American dream - or nightmare

TV REVIEW:
Any Human HeartChannel 4, Sunday The Trials of Phoebe PrinceRTÉ1, Monday American DreamBBC2, Saturday JFK: The Making of Modern PoliticsBBC2, Sunday The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd MargaretMore4, Sunday

LOVELY TO BE

able to shut out current affairs for a couple of hours and lapse into another superbly made big-budget period drama.

Any Human Heart

by William Boyd is one of those sprawling doorstop-sized novels that seem impossible to televise, so it was an inspired decision by Channel 4 to get Boyd himself to do the paring down and create a four-part screen adaptation.

Boyd’s theme – that every human being is a collection of selves or, as he says, “we never stay one person as we journey to the grave” – is worked out through the impossibly eventful life of Logan Mountstuart, who we first meet as an elderly man (played by a magnetic Jim Broadbent) shuffling around his tumbledown rural French home.

Reaching the end of his life, he attempts to put his memories in order. Thus we are presented with three other Logans – a sailor-suited child in Uruguay (“you’re half Uruguayan,” his titled mother-in-law later shrieks in alarm); a smug but tortured Oxford undergraduate in the 1920s (Sam Claflin) who begins his writerly life with a racy potboiler; and finally the middle-aged Logan (Matthew Macfadyen), a moderately successful author married to Lady Lottie but with a keen eye for the ladies and a desperate need to make money.

Logan's life spans the 20th century, and he has a knack of hitting the key moments – in a corny way that somehow works. He meets Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s. He runs into Edward and Mrs Simpson (not entirely convincingly played by a too chunky Tom Hollander, last seen playing a vicar, and ex X-filerGillian Anderson, who is too gorgeous to be Wallis). His widowed mother loses her fortune in the 1929 crash (and takes in lodgers – there are recession tips everywhere). Finally, as a reporter, Logan takes a well-paid gig to cover the Spanish civil war. Life is indeed, as a similar fictional hero was wont to say, like a box of chocolates. And that was all in episode one, which still managed to proceed at a leisurely, almost dreamy pace.

There were some jarring moments: Claflin walks up the aisle and a minute later Logan is played by the much older and quite different-looking Macfadyen – is marriage that transforming or ageing? Also, the music could have been turned down a notch. Some of the characters were cardboard creations, such as his first love, Land Fothergill, a bluestocking cliche who was as hard to believe as her name.

Any Human Heartis made by the same people who created Downton Abbey,so it's gorgeous to look at, with endless sunny days, men who wear hats and women in wonky handknits and tea dresses. Worth escaping to again next week.

FOUR MONTHS AFTERleaving Co Clare with her mother and sister to live in Hadley, Massachusetts, 15-year-old Phoebe Prince came home from school and took her own life; her 11-year-old sister found her body and called 911. It has been alleged – and the theory is supported by the actions of the district attorney – that her death was the result of bullying by six other pupils at her school. The teenagers have been charged with a list of offences that could see them serving long sentences in adult prison.

It has been a major media story in the US, to the extent that The Trials of Phoebe Prince, a documentary screened on RTÉ on Monday, received coverage in news media there – mostly for the compassionate comments made by her soft-spoken, dignified father, Jeremy Prince. Still devastated by the loss of his daughter, he said, "the only real healing is being able to forgive", but "it's bloody hard". From this vantage point the documentary shines an uncomfortable light on the American legal system and the poor protection offered to vulnerable children by Phoebe's high school.

In advance of any pretrial hearing of the six accused, documents about Phoebe’s mental health and previous suicide attempt were leaked to the media – thereby putting Phoebe herself on trial. Many commentators have questioned the long list of charges levied against her six fellow students (including statutory rape, because she had a relationship with two of the boys when she was underage). These young people have lived in the media spotlight for the past year, and even if the case doesn’t go to trial, which has to be decided this month, their futures are seriously compromised.

Of Phoebe’s integration into the US high school, an environment that sounds like a Darwinian nightmare, one student said “maybe she didn’t understand the culture, didn’t understand the cliques”. While the teens have been charged, the school authorities have been let off the hook, although they clearly had an obligation to protect any student being harassed.

When Phoebe’s mum took her girls to live in the US to see if it could provide a better life for them, it was, as her father now says, “an experiment that went disastrously wrong”.

JUST HOW THEconcept of the land of promise evolved in its modern form in the 1960s was explored in American Dream,a fascinating three-part documentary told through the experiences of ordinary people who lived through it. It was all happy homemakers and sprawling bungalows in the burgeoning white middle-class suburbs, with dad going to work and being welcomed home with a martini. The winner of Mrs America 1965 was misty eyed as she reminisced about laundry competitions in which contestants removed stains and ironed to the sound of the William Telloverture.

But beneath the surface, anxiety defined the age. “Commies” were under the bed. A whole swathe of women were buckling under the pressure of maintaining domestic perfection while suffering its attendant boredom. By the 1970s Valium was the most prescribed drug in the US.

AS WE AREfacing into the teeth of an election, there were tips aplenty for would-be politicians in JFK: The Making of Modern Politics, in which Andrew Marr marked the 50th anniversary of JFK's election. He convincingly puts forward the idea that this was the first modern election and that JFK – or rather his backroom team – invented modern electioneering.

At the beginning of 1960 John FitzGerald Kennedy was a rich east-coast playboy who nobody had heard of. Eleven months later he was president. He (or more accurately his dad) threw money at it, pulled strokes, met as many plain folk as possible and honed a quite false image of vigour and good health. He understood the power of TV, the new media of the day, and above all resisted where possible talking about the details.

He was the first to sell a lifestyle and use his family to build an image. But best not to follow that example too closely or risk looking self-serving and stupid. Witness the did-I-really-see-that TV image of the week (in a week of many): the sight of a toddler on the knee of one of our parliamentarians, Paul Gogarty, at an international press conference as his party effectively collapsed the government and plunged us even deeper into confusion and misery.

Increasingly good sitcom Old fashioned slapstick meets deadpan comedy queen

The hilarious off-beat comedy Pulling, about three girls sharing a flat in London, disappeared from the little-watched screen (it was on BBC3) about the time Sharon Horgan, its co-writer and one of its stars, picked up a British Comedy Award for best comedy entertainment actress.

It took a while, but the Irish comedy writer and actress is back performing in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret,a sitcom first screened in the US. It stars David Cross ( Arrested Development) as a clueless yank who bluffs his way into a job in London where he has to flog a consignment of dodgy energy drinks.

The running gag is hangdog Todd's complete inability to understand the culture, not helped by his assistant Dave (Blake Harrison, The Inbetweeners), who uses every opportunity to humiliate him.

Horgan, whose deadpan delivery wrings the best out of even the flattest lines, plays his love interest. It’s a weird hybrid of old-fashioned slapstick and corny jokes – Todd turns up for a date wearing what he has been told are ordinary English clothes, full hunting gear – mixed with the same knowing irony that made Arrested Development so good. Worth a look.