Last Night's TV: Strung out but still hitting the high notes

On paper, "A Trip to Asia: on the Road with the Berlin Philharmonic" looked like terrible TV. For a start, it was about classical music, which apart from having its connotations (old- fashioned, elitist) typically goes on for ages and involves people sitting more or less still. Worse, it was about classical music played by a German orchestra, which implies a) humourlessness ("In Germany," a piccolo-player pointed out, "everything's taken seriously") and b) subtitles, a phenomenon that has all but vanished from the main terrestrial channels. To top it all off, this being in the Imagine... strand, it started with Alan Yentob explaining what we were about to see and why it was so interesting, which as far as I'm concerned is about as alluring as the message on the front of a cigarette carton explaining that you're about to harm your unborn child and/or give yourself cancer. Mind you, I'm a non-smoker, so what do I know? Maybe that's all part of the attraction.

So, on paper, awful; on screen, riveting. That shouldn't, perhaps, be surprising. Any orchestra is composed of individuals who are, almost by definition, somewhat eccentric and egotistical. You have to be both, first to choose classical music as a career, and then to exercise the kind of slavish devotion to your craft that will get you anywhere; so any orchestra will, if you can get the cameras in there, throw up as much emotional perturbation as any Big Brother house. The Berlin Philharmonic makes particularly good material, because its standards are so much higher than other orchestras, and because of its peculiar quasi-democratic structure, in which every member – including the conductor, Simon Rattle – is elected by a two-thirds majority. So this was a film not about music, though it was punctuated by marvellous chunks of the Eroica and Richard Strauss, but about the constant tension between being an individual and being part of a team, between playing to the utmost of your ability, but never being louder or better than your neighbour. As one woman said, her husband couldn't understand why she put so much effort into it when nobody could hear her anyway.

Nearly all the orchestra players interviewed here spoke of the constant pressure of their life. Pressure for technical excellence, but also pressure to fit in, all of it heightened by the stress of a weeks-long tour of China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. And many of these are people for whom fitting in does not come naturally. One arresting sequence had a number of players itemising the miseries of their childhood. Sarah Willis, a horn player, remembered not fitting in, never being popular, finding refuge only in being the best at music (and then, arriving at music college in London, finding she wasn't even that any more). Albrecht Mayer talked about the terrible stutter he developed, the frustration of never being able to answer a teacher's question, and finding peace in the oboe. Thomas Timm, second violin, said: "I was the kind of person one might describe as odd. Someone you wouldn't want to hang around with." I suspected the producers of being over-selective here, to make a point, but later on Rattle spoke about how they were all the outcasts at school. And Rattle's the cool one.

For some, such as Mayer, the Berlin Philharmonic was like home. He said that he was only calm when he was with the orchestra, making music, but even he spoke about how, in his early days, the other players had striven deliberately to find his breaking point. Aline Champion, first violin, said that playing with the Berlin was like a lengthy course of psychoanalysis: "You see things you don't want to see." The piccolo player Virginie Reibel was still on probation, and the other woodwinds had told her she wasn't up to it. They had also told her that this was nothing personal, but she didn't entirely believe that. A sad postscript noted that she had not been elected to permanent membership.

Along with all the pressure came images of Asia, familiar but still startling: gleaming towers, neon-washed nightscapes, temples and street markets, tradition overlaid with garish novelty in a way that must seem familiar to classical musicians struggling to sell records these days. And if you knew the politics, there was a fascinating undercurrent of snipiness about Rattle's position, one player pointing out that he had played with Karajan, and still listened for that sound; another saying, "Conductors come and go, but the Berlin Philharmonic remains."

There were more ominous words in Afghantsi – part of More4's Peter Kosminsky season – an extraordinary 1988 film about Soviet conscripts stuck in a tiny stone hill fort in Afghanistan. Like "A Trip to Asia", this was about living in a close-knit group, but also about dying, and in horrible ways. We heard stories of torture and dead comrades, saw footage of a dog gnawing on a corpse. It ended with the words of a Russian general: "Measure your cloth seven times, because you can only cut it once". In other words, think very hard before you get into a situation. Twenty years on, the USSR is dead and conflict in Afghanistan rumbles on.

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