Television review

LAST NIGHT

Hostile Waters (Sat BBC1) was apparently based on a true story - or, at least, one of those paranoid part-works which slowly erect themselves around half-obscured events, in this case the sinking of a Soviet Yankee- class submarine. At the time, the incident was reported to be the result of an accidental fire in a missile tube - just another tribute to Russian quality control, in other words. But Troy Kennedy-Martin's drama added a little spice of cold-war conspiracy to the pot. The ship had actually been damaged, the opening sequence suggested, by an American submarine playing cat-and-mouse games beneath the Atlantic. Because of the impending Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, the truth had been concealed - but millions of lives had been at risk, and now we were going to find out how. "Not only will we be vaporised," said an urgent Russian officer, explaining a tricky development to his captain. "But the entire eastern seaboard of the US will feel the heat."

As a foundation for a drama, this had two conspicuous problems - the first is that we already know the ending. By all accounts, the eastern seaboard of the US is still in existence (if you trust "them", that is) and no missiles were accidentally launched on Washington. So, our view of the various crises through which the crew pass is bound to be a little detached. "If those reactors go, it's gonna make Chernobyl look like a backyard barbecue," someone said at one point, but the line could do little to enliven the interminable rod-lowering scene that followed. Such sequences are meant to crank the tension up, but, as the masked figure heaved at his handle (absolutely nothing seems to have been oiled on this ship), he was clearly winding things the wrong way.

The second problem is that life seems to have imitated art on this occasion, in particular the hallowed cliches of the wartime submarine film. It's true that there were no sweaty-browed silences as a destroyer's sonar pinged past overhead, and no depth-charges either. But almost every other component was in place, from the sinister leaks in rusty bolts to the valiant hero condemned to be sealed behind a hatch so that his comrades can live. There was the grudging admiration for an unseen adversary ("He must be a remarkable man"), plenty of periscoping, and even a sublime bit of stiff-upper-lippery at the end, when a Soviet admiral calls out the name of the dead hero: "Still on patrol, sir," snapped Rutger Hauer in a display of military pathos that even John Mills might have envied.

Omnibus's film (Sun BBC1) about the creation of a Kazakh soap opera looked oddly like a home movie on occasions - a bit of a wedding, shots out of the airplane window, overlong sequences of camels. But, although there were puzzles in Andrzej Fidyk's film ("Who on earth is that weird bloke with the accordion?", for example) most of them fell into place by the end. Accordion man turned out be a local performer hoping for a part, to which end he displayed his multiple talents to the producers. They decided they had no openings for a man who could make funny noises by waggling his Adam's apple, which, for all I know, may have been another instance of their failure to appreciate local conditions.

The director had noticed that the celebrations for a British scriptwriter's wedding - in the garden outside a flat-pack Tudorbethan house - were just as richly "ethnic" as a gathering of Kazakhs outside their yurts. In case we hadn't noticed, he included some pointed close-ups - of Tony's bride's extravagant lacquered fingernails and, much later, of Tony's cowboy boots, their macho affectation suddenly conspicuous among the genuine horsemen of the Kazakh plains. This kind of equivalence cuts both ways, though. While it wasn't easy to feel sympathy for the men in the British contingent - who came across as condescending - you suspected that the Kazakh creative types might be even worse. Not so much intellectual heroes swept aside by Western cultural imperialism, but egoists without even the alibi of professional competence.