Which Blair project is it?

WE’RE entering a new millennium. Not for real, don’t panic, but in episode three of BLAIR & BROWN: THE NEW LABOUR REVOLUTION (BBC2, 9pm).

So yes, it feels like a time of hope. And yet not as much hope, it seems, as the country had, er, hoped for.

No, the people of Britain are getting impatient.

They’re saying Tony Blair’s government has reneged on many of its promises.

And Blair, surprisingly, hasn’t given the obvious response – which would, of course, have been: “Yeah, course we have, suckers! That’s what governments do, remember?

“You didn’t seriously fall for all that Things Can Only Get Better twaddle..?”

Instead, he almost seems to be agreeing with them.

Or at least not entirely disagreeing. He accepts he has yet to deliver a shake-up on the scale he’d talked about.

But he’s insisting he will. And since it’ll mean a radical departure from Labour’s old ways, he and Chancellor Gordon Brown will then surely drift further apart.

Not as far apart, mind you, as if Blair had admitted then what he admits now. “I admired Margaret Thatcher as a leader and an agent of change,” he tells the programme.

“Also, I really liked the way she did her hair.”

All right, he doesn’t say that second bit.

But he’s happy to admit she was “very strong and effective” – while some of his own party’s traditions didn’t sit well with him.

“The idea that the problems of Britain were going to be solved by nationalisation, by more trade union power, by leaving public services as they were,” he reflects, “this was just a return to the past.”

Elsewhere tonight, they’re building a FirstWorldWar fighter plane in HORNBY: A MODEL WORLD (Yesterday, 9pm).

The Hornby team are doing that, I mean, not the Labour Party.

But recreating this aircraft, a Bristol Fighter, on a 1/48th scale is proving rather fiddly. If I were them I’d save myself the faffing and just make a full-sized one.

Earlier, the specialist subjects for contestants and the public to get their heads around on MASTERMIND (BBC2, 7.30pm) are the saxophone, Margaret Thatcher (yes, she’s everywhere tonight), Buffy The Vampire Slayer and venomous snakes of Africa, and that’s before you get to the tricky general knowledge bit.

And which would you say was the odd one out?

Yes, that’s right: it’s the saxophone.

The other three all come under the heading of Things You’d Be Mad To Pick A Fight With.