TELEVISION

WHAT’S THE joke Nigella has been told shortly before the camera is switched on? On (BBC2) she can barely suppress her giggling and smirking – like a teenager. I’ve not liked her since she gave my Peter Sellers biography an impertinent review in 1994, but that’s not a good enough excuse for me to keep mocking her strange mask-like oval face.

Had Derek Jarman written and directed an espionage saga, it would have resembled (BBC2). Many of its episodes beautifully evoked hellish circles of paranoia and conspiracy. We had an ice-queen mother (Charlotte Rampling), a prisoner in a peeling moated grange, which contained a locked room full of chalky doodles. James Fox silkily issued threats in a Pall Mall club. Mark Gatiss was a perspiring drug dealer, giving his most thoroughly macabre performance since The League of Gentlemen.

Ben Whishaw, as the hero, was like an 18th-century innocent, knocked about and abused – and the capital did have a Hogarthian sense of sleaze and neon-lit squalor. In one horrible medical scene, Ben was deliberately infected with the Aids virus by the corrupt Establishment, who were going to any lengths to keep their secrets secret – including taking Jim Broadbent by taxi to Hampstead Heath so that he could obligingly hang himself from a tree.

Like most things these days, London Spy failed to add up. The MI6 clever-clogs whose body was found in a locked steamertrunk had been murdered because he’d devised a formula to detect when people were lying. Apparently the politicians of the world wanted his computer programme suppressed. So they’d concocted this massive plot, which untold hundreds of unsmiling people were now carrying out with alacrity. Yet realistically speaking, would everyone involved in the global cover-up keep covering it up? Surely someone in the chain of command, Fox when he’d reflected a bit for instance, or Harriet Walter, who was also in the cast, or Rampling, think that software to detect evasions and insincerity might be useful ?

But I don’t mind nonsensicality, if there is atmosphere. Or so I used to think.

(ITV) had tons of atmosphere, but it was daft beyond belief, worse than Doctor Who – and parenthetically, why has Peter Capaldi come to resemble an elderly lesbian? I watched it solely because they

Simply Nigella

and Hyde

London Spy

Jekyll