Television Review

Here we are halfway through February and we're still faced with Christmas leftovers. Gobble (Sat BBC1), a food-scare satire by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, was originally intended to go out on 21 December, but fell foul of the Scottish food poisoning incident, the BBC taking the view that the proximity of real deaths might make the comedy ones appear a little tasteless. It's conventional to lambast the Corporation for its cravenness on occasions such as this, but watching the programme one could rather see their point. Had it been a bit funnier, there would have been less of a problem, but even without the unwelcome collaboration of the E-Coli bug, some of the jokes here tasted a bit off as you swallowed them. It's mildly funny, for example, to show a government minister force-feeding his son a turkey leg at a photo-call, but it's rather disruptive of the satire to find that the child then dies - though the event allows for some gags about the self-serving heartlessness of politics, you still find yourself fretting a little for the grieving father.The original gag also illustrates one of the prevailing difficulties facing the writers throughout the drama - that in most cases, the original inspiration for the satire can scarcely be improved upon. Think of Cordelia Gummer jibbing at the beefburger thrust beneath her nose and the frenzied spin- doctoring that followed, in which journalists were pursuaded that her reluctance was solely to do with the temperature of the burger, not any childish intuition that she might be playing Russian roulette with her brain cells. Far funnier and more inventive, surely, than the thin photocopy we were offered here?

Elsewhere, too, the comedy suffered from its simple assertion of things we think we already know - that governments are mendacious, civil-servants machiavellian, and big businessmen greedy and exploitative. As a list of contents for a contemporary satire, this leaves almost nothing out, but a list of contents isn't really satisfying in itself, and in the crudity with which it allowed its comic targets to announce their villainy, the film also perversely undermined its central invention: the revelation that the government hasn't actually been telling lies at all ("I know it's a difficult concept to grasp," shouts the hero, as the press men groan in disbelief). This includes us - the gullible consumers of junk- news - in the arraignment, which is a sharp point, but one effectively blunted by the fact that the drama has spent 40 minutes depicting the establishment as a slurry of amoral opportunism. If they didn't do anything wrong, it's only another mark of their incompetence, because they certainly intended to.

This isn't to say there were no laughs at all - the image of the L!ve TV News Bunny doing a goosestep as the presenter reads out an item about the German agriculture minister was spot on, and there were several lines which were a little more oblique in their attack: "We couldn't find anything - not even any Semtex," announces a government analyst, reporting on tests into turkey samples. But such moments were a relief from a coarser, more cynical kind of comedy. Matters weren't greatly helped by Kevin Whately's central performance as a guileless civil servant, which leaves his talent for comedy as an unresolved question, or by Jimmy Mulville's direction - long on showy crane-shots and short on subtlety.

Branded (Sat BBC2), a three-part series about big-name products, kicked off with Nike, one of the fastest-growing brands in the world. Star footballers who do the same get handsomely rewarded for their pains, but Peter Swain's film distanced itself from the charge of mere promotion by examining the company's use of Far Eastern sweatshops, and detailing the less appealing aspects of its aggressively competitive culture: "Break the rules. Fight the law" reads one of the corporate commandments. The film also made a futile attempt to rouse our indignation about the trainer culture which feeds Nike's massive profits - futile because the notional "victims" are aware of how they are being manipulated: "Yeah, we are a load of mugs," said a cheerful schoolboy, acutely describing the unbreakable connection between expense and exclusivity. Futile, too, because it made Nike seem wicked; no praise could be higher for the playground consumers.