Television review

There was a moment in Omnibus's programme (Sun BBC1) on Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais when you could see work-in-progress on the writers' word processor. They appeared to be doing rewrites for Bad Boys II, a sequel to a Hollywood buddy picture, and the deathless line that appeared on screen was someone's riposte to a nurse carrying a hypodermic needle: "Stick that in me, and I'll airmail your ass back to Dublin". The title of Louis Heaton's film, "Whatever Happened to Clement and La Frenais?" was more than a simple allusion to one of their great successes, it also hinted at another question: was this sort of drab tough-talk really the best employment for their comic talent? Ian La Frenais said that he thought it was - "Not a second-rate job at all," he replied quickly, when the hard question was put as the programme was edging out of the door. But he didn't seem very convinced, conceding after a little pause that he would have answered differently a few years ago. He did not give any reasons for his change of heart or, if he did, Heaton did not include them.

Of course, it's faintly preposterous to raise the notion of failure in the first place - after all, they write The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen Pet, all benchmarks for popular television, and then they go off to Hollywood to earn frightening sums of money for injecting some human feeling into the computerised thrill rides that now pass for movies. I should be such a failure. But audiences can feel disappointment as well as critics, in a way that doesn't carry any undertones of triumphal judgement - and the scenes you saw from Porridge did make you regret that their lines now largely come wrapped in the steroid-soaked excesses of action movies. The Likely Lads has its gauche patches, though affection for the characters is likely to carry you through them; Auf Wiedersehen Pet is beginning to look a touch dated, partly because it was such an intense response to the politics of its time; but Porridge remains amazingly untouched by the years, a comedy whose situation prevented it escaping from the most difficult kind of comedy to get right - that of people simply reacting to each other. It may be fanciful, though, to think that Hollywood took this away from us. The sort of labour that went into it, according to this account, arises from a unique conjunction of confidence and doubt - the sense that you can be funny and the fear that you won't be quite funny enough. And that is probably the sort of conjunction that only comes once in a writing career, whatever trajectory it follows next.

The South Bank Show (Sun ITV) marked its 20th birthday in a generous way, by commissioning four first-time directors to make four short films about artists who interested them. This was a testing generosity, though - it being rather more difficult to make a 15-minute programme than something more forgiving of sprawl. The subjects chosen betrayed a youthful taste for experiment and oddity and some of them effectively withdrew beyond the reach of criticism. "We've never really liked that kind of performing that's all about virtuoso skill and blah blah blah blah blah..." said the leader of an avant-garde theatre group, "We've always kind of liked failure and incompetence." On those terms, they were doing very well, as far as one could tell.

None of the films were radical departures from the existing conventions of art television and not all of them had quite resolved what it was they wanted to say. But the best of them, to my mind, was Franca Cereghini's film about the sculptor Marc Quinn. This included the sight of the artist moulding a self- portrait bust out of his own faeces, a sequence which may have given it an unfair advantage in the memorability stakes. But she also showed an ability to make a chain of images flow like an argument, and to invent visual gimmicks that worked with her theme - such as an interview in which the artist's head just broke the surface of dark pool of water, so that the liquid mapped the changing contours of his face. The result was engrossing as well as gross.