Television: Conan the anti-communitarian

Listening to the radio last week, I caught an American woman talking about the latest cult TV show. She watched it every week with her eight- year-old nephew, she said, because, "he likes the violent action, and I enjoy the lesbian undertones". Mmm, I thought, it sounds ideal. I've long believed that the trouble with most modern TV cults has been the complete absence of lesbianism.

So I tuned into Xena: Warrior Princess (Channel 5, Saturday) full of hope and expectation. And I was only partly disappointed: the action was certainly everything that one could hope for. The lesbianism, however, was so undertoned that I completely missed it. The simple fact of its existence - as attested to by the gay community - had to suffice.

In essence, Xena is Conan the Woman, looking as though mad scientists had grafted the head of Anna Ford on to the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Except in Xena's case the term "breast-plate" takes on a new meaning, with a complicated and heavy-looking design of brass snakes entwining themselves in protection of her interesting-looking bosom. Also like Conan, Xena is a swordsperson of few words, specialising in high-pitched expostulation ("Yaaah!") and ululation ("elelelelelelele!"). These are invariably a prelude to a bout of gravity-defying leaping, somersaulting and kicking.

Xena's psychology is something of a mystery. We know that she's a Thracian from Amphipolis, but this seems to be an entirely abitrary domicile, allocated by a producer who once read a book. And though she's a Princess, her mother is not a Queen, but a rather harassed small hotelier, in a wattle-and- daub slum in (I presume) downtown Amphipolis. As to Xena's sexuality, it is true that she exhibits either complete contempt or murderous hostility towards all the males she encounters. But I am old enough to know that this is not necessarily (or even principally) a characteristic of lesbianism.

Xena just is. As are her enemies, the arrow-catching Draco and his band of pointless brigands, who ride about ineffectually and pillage things. Even the countryside seems to have been drained of autonomous life, looking like a cross between Tellytubbyland with cyclopses instead of rabbits, and the oddly anodyne country parks where Power Rangers do their stuff. Only the girl teen sidekick - straight out of one those suburban American kids' dramas, like The Babysitters' Club - has any depth. "Gee," she says to Xena (in a lesbian undertone). "That kick you do, you've got to show me that!"

The most significant thing about Xena is the politics. Her main job is to rescue villages from predation. All these places are populated by the cast from Little House on the Prairie - except wearing clothes left over from old Star Treks. They spend their lives in three basic pursuits: going to and fro from the fields with vegetably things on their heads, or in carts; sitting in taverns muttering; and - occasionally - banding together to shout at strangers. These communities are utterly pathetic and ignorant and no one would want to be like them (certainly not when they could be roaming free round the world, clad in a leather bodice and studded gloves).

No wonder that - in the final scene of this week's episode - Xena and Draco literally walk and stomp on the villagers' heads as they fight each other. The message is clear: Xena is an anti-communitarian (even though she spends her time saving communities). She's an individualist, whose rejection of the restrictions of communal life is to be admired.

An identical message emerged from Omnibus: Dame Henrietta's Dream (BBC1, Mon). This clever documentary was ostensibly about Hampstead Garden Suburb, originally created by Dame Henrietta Barnett as a kind of model village for all classes to live together in harmony. To enforce that harmony, tough rules governed physical aspects of the Suburb, including the rule that no hedge was to be more than five feet high.

But this was not a film about buildings or architecture or design. This was a programme about how people behave, and - as a piece of programme- making - was practically a model of how it should be done. First, pick a subject that is both salient and well peopled. Well, how communities live together is certainly a big issue these days - and the Suburb is stuffed full of folk who seem to want to talk. So, second, introduce the place through its archetypal characters. And who could have been better than the septuagenarian couple Rose and Louis Kochane? Rose and Louis were a new variation on the neighbours from hell. But not because they made loud noises and threw their rubbish on the street: quite the opposite. Rose and Louis persecuted their neighbours through complaint. For instance, it was "not right to have duvets hanging out of the window in this area. It's not like King's Cross or Camden Town, where it is a normal thing". (It isn't, of course. Any duvet left hanging out in King's Cross wouldn't last five minutes.)

The bemedalled Louis was concerned that his neighbour wanted to use his premises for nefarious purposes, and delivered up the line of the year. "I fought for the freedom," said Louis, "not to live next door to a guest- house if I didn't want to." I asked my mother about this, but she didn't recall any wartime slogans about stopping Adolf and his Hunnish hotels. So Louis - who at the time presumably thought that it was Nazi tyranny and murderous anti-semitism against which he fought - had redefined his own history so that it legitimised his struggle against his neighbour. This had helped him to invest the trivial with extraordinary importance.

The film then generalised from Louis's narrow viewpoint with the tale of the struggle about the erection of an eruv - poles with one wire slung between them, marking the bounds within which Orthodox Jews may carry and push things on the Sabbath. Some local Jews were committed to an eruv, no matter how much it offended their neighbours. One, the odious Mr Waiman, even took photos of the back of an opponent's house to show that the windows, hidden from normal view, did not conform to Henrietta's original strictures. Other inhabitants became equally determined - far beyond the importance of the thing - to resist. Gradually the film showed rationality departing, as one man even considered leaving his beautiful garden and nice house to escape from a distant pole and a wire.

So we moved towards a denouement, in which the viewer was encouraged to believe that - on the same evening - we had the Waimans' glitzy and vulgar bar mitzvah, the local dramatic society's performance of T S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, and the AGM of the Residents' Association. By which time I ached for a loud "yaah!" and Xena the Warrior Princess to come and walk on their silly heads.

In Niceville, where there are no Protestants, Bosnians or eruvs, there are only Friends (Channel 4, Friday). This week's show had the neat idea of setting the action in real time, as Ross struggles to get the others changed and into a taxi inside 25 minutes.

But the old magic wasn't working for me. I found myself becoming strangely impatient with them all. Suddenly, they seemed too old for all this mucking about. They should be getting proper jobs, like advertising shampoos; and two - Phoebe and Joey - are definitely putting on weight.

Lasting better is Frasier (Channel 4, Friday), whose new series started this week. In particular, Frasier's brother Niles - fastidious, effete and also lustful - is a glorious creation; one moment tweezing the husks out of his muffin, the next examining Daphne's bottom. The Snobbery- in-Seattle theme is always fruitful, and the script invariably includes some piece of complex wit, as when Frasier, on his radio show, addresses "Keith the narcoleptic. We'll resume our conversation when you're feeling a bit more alert".

Five Hundred Bus Stops (BBC2, Tues) could only have come from Britain. Based on Radio 4's The Shuttleworths, it purports to be the video diary of incompetent northerner John Shuttleworth's musical tour of trans-Pennine Britain. The characters are Shuttleworth himself and - holding the camera - his manager/neighbour Ken Worthington, who once suffered trauma at the hands of David Hamilton in a 1973 edition of New Faces. Its charm lies in its extreme modesty, and its British celebration of eccentric under- achievement. I love it - and think it deserves cult status. Though it might be improved if there were a few lesbian undertones. Then again, perhaps there already are.