Bubbling under bonnets

TV Review: 'Gird your loins, it's all go in Cranford!" As the genteel orchestral arrangement tinkled, and the cast list for the BBC's weighty new drama, Cranford, appeared on the screen, gently tattooing a milky pastoral watercolour of docile beasts and plumply pretty fields with big names from the female acting fraternity (among them Dame Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Imelda Staunton), I felt a tincture of dread worming its way into my own recalcitrant loins.

The prospect, on a rainy Sunday night, of great British dames with lacy bonnets and trick moles interpreting dusty literature felt more than a little medicinal, but I know what's good for me, so I shut up and swallowed.

Cranford, a five-part period drama scripted by Heidi Thomas, is based on three Elizabeth Gaskell novels and is set in the 1840s in a dainty Cheshire market town on the shores of the Manchester metropolis. It is a town on the cusp of great change, and its inhabitants must prepare for the imminent arrival of the mechanised beast of the railway and a breakdown in their refined laws of decorum and petticoat order.

Come to think of it, my recalcitrance towards Cranford may have been ignited by my harbouring an irrational fear of English market towns - a bar, in the seedier end of the last one I visited, had knickerless women in white slingbacks dancing on the tables, voluntarily. This image, juxtaposed against architectural rows of foxglove and lupin adorning chocolate-box sandstone cottages, makes me feel a little queasy. However, back to the programme. On the evidence, it looks like the fears of advancing modernity among Cranford's inhabitants couldn't have been more right, and my own bonnet-and-mole fears couldn't have been more wrong.

Cranford is fantastic: funny, heart-warming, superbly acted, pacily scripted, it is an intelligent, gently captivating historic soap opera. Brimming with understated talent, the real joy of it is in the performances. Atkins, as the dolefully correct but principled Miss Deborah (nascent feminism bubbling beneath her bonnet), and Dench, as Miss Matty, her warmly engaging sister, lead an enviable cast which also includes Michael Gambon, Philip Glenister and the saturnine Jim Carter as Captain Brown, a man pushing the boundaries of good taste by reading Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, while across town Francesca Annis, as steely aristocrat Lady Ludlow, barely raises an eyebrow as she condemns the lower orders to illiteracy in order to keep them in their place and dampen their ardour for revolution.

Cranford really is as good as period drama gets, and as our precocious world splutters chaotically onwards there is something hypnotically peaceful about our forebears' hysteria over the death of the parish bull, or their excited bewilderment when the moggie eats the antique lace - and equally, something redolently familiar in a community contemplating destruction in the face of technological change and an unknown future. Watch it, I implore you.

DOCTORS AND THEIR daughters made for poignant viewing this week. While Panorama's investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann sought to dispel some of the wilder allegations of the last few months and mop up some of the sloppier journalistic spillages from that tragic case, it did little to engender hope for the return of that beautiful child.

And then there was heart surgeon Maurice Neligan, speaking on Would You Believe about the murder of his 31-year-old daughter, Sara, this year. Would You Believe, which comes under RTÉ's umbrella of religious broadcasting, is a quietly powerful strand, telling personal stories of endurance, courage and hope, stories that challenge and ultimately reaffirm the quixotic notion of faith. Neligan, for whom belief is a mainstay of a productive life, was a fascinating and sympathetic subject.

Filmed in his Dublin home and at his family retreat in Co Kerry, the pioneering surgeon spoke with hard-won equanimity about Sara's death. Sara, a nurse, one of Neligan's seven children, was found stabbed in her Dublin apartment. It was an event he described as being "so far out of your own experience as to be literally unbelievable".

A man of the old school, a Blackrock College boy (he was an average student, he modestly claimed, who kept his head below the parapet) and a son of "humane, calm and rational" parents whose credo was "look out for other people", Neligan reserved his anger and disappointment for the health service from which he has recently retired and, most particularly, for the Minister of Health, Mary Harney, whom he described as "an avenging angel". The depth of his disquiet about a system which, he feels, severely discriminates against the less fortunate and which has turned patients into "clients" and carers into "bean counters" was palpable.

That this deeply compassionate man could still be moved to anger against our flawed system in the shadow of personal pain so recently inflicted was indicative of just how appalling a mess he had to leave behind when he retired from surgery. One was left hoping that his clarity and courage would be rewarded and that he would indeed see his child again in another life, a belief he holds firmly and a central tenet of his lifelong faith.

THE MCCANN SAGA is an altogether more desperate case and, unlike Neligan's story, devoid of any sense of redemption. Journalist Richard Bilton's straightforwardly incisive Panorama report cast little new light on Madeleine's disappearance more than 200 days ago, but included an interview with Jane Tanner, a friend of the McCanns (one of the so-called "Tapas Nine"), in which she claimed to have seen a man carrying a sleeping child outside the McCanns' apartment just minutes after Gerry McCann had gone to check on his three sleeping children.

"I had been thinking to myself how lucky I was," McCann said, recalling his last moments with his then three-year-old daughter. McCann believes his family were being watched during their holiday, that "a predator" may even have been hiding in the apartment during that last check, someone who was aware of their movements, aware that the children's parents and their friends dined nightly in a restaurant in the holiday complex which, although close by, was not close enough to make their roadside flat entirely visible.

Central to Bilton's report was the question of why the McCanns aroused the suspicion of the Portuguese police and media, and in the end, the explanation seemed rooted in cultural misunderstanding. Restrained desperation and the diligent avoidance of an avalanche of guilt and grief by means of a full-on media campaign have, it would appear, won them few friends in Praia de Luz. The false sense of security the couple and their friends enjoyed on their week-long holiday (the door to the McCanns' apartment apparently remained unlocked while they dined) may have been indicative of bloated over-confidence, but that is a different beast from culpability. This distressingly hopeless film left one convinced of the couple's innocence but critical, as they must surely be themselves, of their inexplicable complacency.

OKAY, THE FESTIVE season's beckoning, so it's time to rot your offspring's insides by pouring litres of sugar and sump oil down their throats (well, actually, I have no idea what is lurking inside a bottle of Coca-Cola, but I do know it's useful for cleaning brass and dissolving snails and probably also scouring one's oesophagus). Dispatches: Coca-Cola saw comedian and activist Mark Thomas traipse across innumerable continents in search of evidence of the Coca-Cola company's exploitative treatment of its employees, of its reckless environmental irresponsibility, of its mind-bending research techniques ("neuro-marketing") and of its corrosive globalist perspective, which kills fish, pollutes water, causes industrial strife and turns spoilt tots into vile, hyperactive, spoilt tots from India to Latin America to Australia and back again (and all with a bottle of fizz, eh?).

Thomas, like a baby in a canning factory, went for the lot in a dizzying welter of condemnation, accusing the company of everything from supporting Hitler Youth to sanctioning child labour in sweltering fields of beet. Coke was painted as the devil's own juice and it wasn't until after we had been all but convinced that Beelzebub was hiding in the bubbles that a company statement was aired, claiming it was as green and clean as it could be, that it was digging wells in India and building communities in Latin America, that it was ever so upset to have this dated tosh splashed around the airwaves - and, more or less, that it didn't make the world's damn problems, it just tried to teach us all to sing in perfect harmony.

The real truth would be as refreshing as the world's favourite beverage. One thing is for certain though: there will be plenty of vomiting toddlers and weeping, manic six-year-olds strewn over the forthcoming Coked-out festive season.

Anyway, any corporation that answers its telephone with "Thank you for calling the world of Coca-Cola, we are excited to hear from you" has to be worth throwing a punch at. Cheers.