When Steptoe Met Son C4

Trail of Guilt BBC1

Cutting Edge: Did Barry George Murder Jill Dando? C4

Steptoe and Son, the sitcom about a pair of rag-and-bone men, was at its peak the most successful TV show in British history. Where that leaves Coronation Street or other challengers for the title, I don't know. But that's what it said in When Steptoe Met Son, and in this strange mess of a documentary it seemed the one solid piece of information to hold on to.

Ostensibly about a tour of Australia that took place after the sitcom came to an end in 1974, the film, like some piece of experimental montage, seemed to be randomly edited. Time and place shifted back and forth without warning so that you were never sure if you were in Sydney in the 1970s or London in the 1960s. The narration contradicted itself without explanation. You kept thinking you were missing something, and then you realised what it was: a story.

The thesis - that the actors who played Steptoe and Son became like their characters - was simple enough. And this could be why, in the absence of a recognisable structure, the filmmakers felt obliged to remind us of it every two minutes.

Steptoe's son was convinced that he was held back by his father; ditto Harry H. Corbett with Wilfrid Brambell. Brambell drove Corbett 'round the twist'; Steptoe did the same to his son. Steptoe's son was 'caught in the scrapyard of life'; Corbett was 'lost in the scrapyards of sitcom'. And so on until I felt both caught and lost in the scrapyard of one idea.

So taken was the programme with its theory that it often didn't bother to distinguish between the real people and their roles. Brambell and Corbett were frequently referred to only as 'Steptoe' and 'Steptoe's son'.

Perhaps this was method documentary-making, in which the flaws of the subject are absorbed into the fabric of the film. This explanation seems no more difficult to entertain than the notion, put forward here, that Corbett was a great method actor, 'England's Marlon Brando,' according to Alan Simpson, the co-writer with Ray Galton of Steptoe and Son .

Simpson said this with a straight face, although you don't write something as bitter as S&S unless your sense of humour tends towards the twisted. Corbett, it seems, was haunted by the thought that he could have been a contender on the English stage, had he not settled for comedy and a large house in St John's Wood. 'He painted himself into an extremely comfortable hole,' noted his friend John Junkin, digging himself, I suppose, into a corner.

The film seemed unsure whether to view Corbett's plight as tragedy or comedy so instead it targeted Brambell. 'On and off screen Steptoe was a dirty old man,' it said. But it also said: 'The world knew him as a dirty old man but in fact he was an elegant and fastidious dandy.'

Were they trying to tell us something? Words like 'dapper' and 'camp' formed a string of euphemisms whose jewel was a line about the old man living 'a curious life, surrounded by fine antiques'. By which point you wondered why they did n't come out and call him a raving queer.

In reality, Brambell could be a little charmless when on the wrong side of a bottle of gin. 'What do you want me to do,' he asked one aged autograph-hunter who had for gotten her pen, 'sign it with my prick?'

In the early Sixties, he was charged with importuning in a public lavatory. 'Brambell's arrest was confusing,' said the sneering voice-over, because 'waiting at home was a wife.' A few moments later, without a word of apology, the narrator suggested that Brambell's wife had left him a decade earlier, after she had a baby with a lodger called Roger. 'He never saw her again.'

Who knows what really happened? We never heard anything more about the wife or the child. For all we know, they're currently on a double-act tour of Australia. Unconcerned with such trifling biography, the film spent a lot of time trying to imply that Brambell was having it off with young boys in Hong Kong, 'a gay pleasure-seeker's paradise'.

Frustratingly, one sensed that there was a brooding tale to be told of fame's incarcerating embrace. And Steptoe and Son, possibly the most claustrophobic sitcom ever broadcast, was a perfect medium through which to view that stasis.

The key to why When Steptoe Met Son was an unremitting disappointment lay in its writing. Aside from the many narrative inconsistencies, clichés such as 'chalk and cheese' were unthinkingly employed and simple words painfully misused (they went on tour 'for one inconsolable reason'). If the filmmakers couldn't put together a coherent sentence, there was always a strong chance they'd be unable to make a coherent film.

The police force is an institution in this country which, like the royal family, for many years operated at a safe remove from public scrutiny. Daylight seldom intruded on the magic of its working methods. But just as the Squidgy tapes forced the Windsors to ease back the velvet curtains, so the Guildford Four and other miscarriages persuaded the police to allow cameras into the incident room.

The result is that nowadays only gardeners and interior decorators can rival police detectives for screen time. The programmes in which they feature are mostly filler material, to be sure, with names that sound like Jeffrey Archer novels, but there appears to be no end to them.

Trail of Guilt, the latest example, was a rather nasty little offering with an almost prurient interest in the grim details of violent crime. Its focus was on a feral-looking psychopath named Michael Hardacre who terrorised Rochdale a couple of years back.

Like nearly all such programmes, it relied heavily on reconstructions. There's something gratuitous about these mini-dramatisations of crime, particularly when they depict rape scenes. Clearly they can't replicate the horror of the actual attack. Instead they work as a kind of macabre entertainment. When interspersed, as they were here, with boffins in white coats outlining the forensic difficulties of isolating DNA from a pair of blood-soaked tights, the effect is decidedly creepy.

Of Hardacre's murder victim, the well-named DS (ret) Bob Huntbach said: 'Dragged up an alley, beaten, stamped upon, strangled, indecently assaulted: who will ever know what that woman went through in the last moments?' That's the point: we can't know, but we can, alas, imagine. The reconstruction, however, is the enemy of imagination. What kind of a literal mind, we might ask, finds it necessary to linger on the image of a mutilated pensioner's bashed-out dentures? Another raped woman had been cut across the face, stabbed twice in the back and left for dead. DCI Mike Freeman analysed the clues. 'It was plainly obvious to me at an early stage,' he said, displaying the faultless powers of deduction for which our detectives are justly renowned, 'that as well as being a rape we were talking about an attempted murder here.'

If the idea of this type of television is to reassure us that the forces of law and order have the upper hand, why is it that, after watching them, one feels a mighty urge to double-lock the front door?

No one from the police showed up in Cutting Edge: Did Barry George Murder Jill Dando? The shooting of Dando has probably excited more media attention in this country than any other single crime in recent history - which means in history. We feel we know everything there is to know about the murder. And we're right, because there's so little that is known.

All of the tiny knowledge that exists was neatly assembled by Cutting Edge and placed next to the troubled figure of George, an epileptic fantasist with a low IQ and past convictions for indecent assault and attempted rape. They did not match up well. The forensic evidence was bordering on negligible, and it was also contaminated in police custody. The rest of the police case was built on the fact that George, the fantasist, lied to them; he was identified by a small minority of witnesses as being near the scene of the crime (he lived not far away); and he had an obsession with celebrities (as do most Heat readers), although not, apparently, with Dando.

The tone of the documentary was scrupulous, never allowing itself to become distracted by cheap attacks on the police enquiry. Its aim was simply to question the evidence. The one certainty it established was that in this case there was nothing approaching certainty. Dando's death is a mystery that is only slightly more baffling than the mystery of how a jury found George responsible for it.