Television Review...BBC1 Wednesday 27 December 2006

A good indication of whether television executives really care about Christmas can be found in the programming between Christmas Day and New Years Eve - do they pad it out with specials, repeats or those dreaded five words "films for all the family."

Last night was the first time we had sat down to watch the television, The Ashes and Dr.Who aside, and BBC1 offered what could be described as a good evenings family entertainment. Celebrity Mastermind, EastEnders, Ruby in The Smoke and Imagine about the Beatles/Cirque Du Soleil project.

Ruby In The Smoke was based on Phillip Pulman's 1985 novel and starred Billie Piper, fresh from her role as Dr.Who's sidekick Rose Tyler, as Sally Lockhart and Julie Walters as a woman whose sole ambition in life was to kill Miss Lockhart and relieve her of the ruby she was supposedly carrying.

Piper was good in a story that switched relentlessly between Shipping Agents, India, the East End of London, Kent and the high seas of China, featuring dark cellars, houses covered in fauna, opium dens and false teeth - in the latter they belonged to the late husband of Julie Waters character. Piper played a character whose real father had sold her in exchange for a ruby and who had inherited two skills, accountancy and the ability to fire a revolver. For a twenty year old the character was pretty forward as well, asking to move in with a photographer and his actress sister on the basis of a business card proferred after the briefest of conversations. It's the sort of thing that happens frequently in so-called 'Arthouse' films and upsets the hard of thinking, here it was done in a typical matter of fact English way.

Walters, for some reason I find completely unfathomable, is regarded as something of a class act in certain circles, to be honest she only appears to have two facial expressions - either stupid (as in Mrs Overall) or on the verge of psychotic violence as here, where she threatened to kill her poor child maid Adelaide over a pot of stewed tea.

Pulman described the novel as a pastiche of Wilkie Collins and he was right, the adaptation was as good as could be expected, but trying to cram two hundred pages of writing into one hundred minutes of prime time television didn't leave much room for characterisation. The story was set mainly in London but filmed in Liverpool and there were plenty of clunky lines of dialogue to remind the actors where they were. It did however contain all the qualities we would expect from a Sunday teatime drama, foggy London, hired heavies, loveable children, a heroine and a pantomine villain (or villainess in this case).

There are three more books to be filmed in the series and I look forward to the next one being shown sometime in 2007.

Alan Yentob's film for the Imagine art programme was about the Beatles Love project that was instigated by George Harrison back in 1999 and was ideal for the post news slot. The film wove the two strands of the project: the Cirque Du Soleil and George Martins re-workings of classic Beatles tracks, well although too much time was spent fawning over Martin and his son and not enough on the superb aristry of the circus troop for my liking.

One of the good things about the programme was that being George Harrison's idea we didn't have to suffer the witterings of Yoko Ono or the pretentions of Paul McCartney.

Having purchased the album on the basis of a pre-release interview in the Sunday Times a few months ago I have to say the album isn't any great shakes to be honest, there are one or two good moments - the Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows combination being the obvious one, but if you want a good example of how two different tunes can be mixed together to create something new and exciting you'd be better off tracking down the New Order/Kylie 12 inch that mixes Blue Monday and Can't Get You Out Of My Head together.