Cuban missiles? This JFK saga has a much more serious crisis

TV REVIEW: THE KENNEDYS(History Channel, Thursday), the new eight-part mini-series telling the story of JFK's presidency, comes trailing controversy. It was ditched by the US History Channel, the station that commissioned it, because "its dramatic interpretation was not a good fit" – widely thought to mean that it was so chock-full of inaccuracies that its boffin viewers would be aghast. It subsequently aired on an obscure cable channel.

This week it washed up here, curiously enough on the History Channel, a sign perhaps that European viewers don’t automatically expect academic accuracy when they see the words “mini-series”. Does anyone watch The Tudors and think Jonathan Rhys Meyers is the spit of Henry VIII and the shenanigans are historically accurate? Ditto the cheesy and astonishingly slow

Kennedys

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Greg Kinnear is Jack and Katie Holmes is Jackie – both have great mops of fabulous hair and the clothes are show stoppers – though it’s hard to buy Holmes, with her china-doll looks, as the president’s wife. Oddly, Kinnear is the only one in the cast with a handle on the Boston twang; you’d think that with a $25 million budget there’d be a few quid for a voice coach. The British actor Tom Wilkinson, as Joe snr, the Kennedy patriarch and key figure in this drama, has all the presence and accent of a headmaster of a provincial English school who has been to the United States on his holidays. He plays the infamous manipulator like Lear in a sprawling family soap opera about infidelity, filial duty and nice interiors.

The action begins with the presidential election in 1960 and cuts backwards and forwards, showing Joe snr’s rise to become ambassador to Britain, news of the death of his favourite son, Joe, in the war, his determination to have a son in the White House and the political rise of JFK and his meeting and marrying Jackie. Politics is so far in the background it’s just scenery: there’s grainy footage of the Cuban missile crisis and Nixon, but most of the time is given over to hammering home the messages that no wife was ever going to keep that dog on the porch and that Daddy pulls the strings – a bit like Dallas and the Jock, JR and Sue Ellen saga.

In the best soap tradition there’s nothing subtle here. As old Joe snogs the secretary in the hall, Rose appears downstairs. Did that happen in real life? Probably not, but it’s a standard scene in soap-land. Katie Holmes is a bland Jackie and Kinnear’s JFK is completely lacking in any charisma – but it pretty much matches the narcotic pace of the piece. The dialogue is repetitive and simplistic, emphasising each message as if the audience was slightly slow, and background music swells up under most scenes. If you get to episode eight and the book depository, your patience is unlikely to be rewarded.

CARE TO SEE an hour-long documentary about the American woman who last week attacked Gauguin's painting Two Tahitian Womenin a Washington, DC gallery because, she said, "it's very homosexual"? Course not. And not just because of her reported follow-up comment that "I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head" – which pretty much gives context to the unfortunate episode. The thought came to mind while watching Louis Theroux: America's Most Hated Family in Crisis(BBC2, Sunday). It was a follow-up to the hugely popular 2007 documentary in which he visited the extended Phelps family, who are the cornerstone of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Plumbing a new murky depth in fundamentalism, their understanding of the Bible leads them to picket the funerals of soldiers killed in action, celebrating their deaths because the Phelpses, who are rarely without a viscerally offensive anti-gay placard, believe their deaths are part of God's punishment of the US for its toleration of gays. One of the Phelps teens told Theroux that she's thrilled to hear news of devastating tsunamis or earthquakes – and the more loss of life, the better because it means God was smiting evil people. Their god does a lot of smiting.

The reason for the documentary was that Theroux had discovered that several of the younger Phelpses were defecting from the church – the crisis in the programme title – which meant also being cut off from their parents. It happens in cults everywhere, so it’s not exactly newsworthy.

The excitement of seeing Theroux back on screen with a new documentary soon wore off – maybe it was at the point when the Phelpses, with glassy-eyed seriousness, described Barack Obama as the Beast and the anti-Christ, and Louis as one of the most evil men in all of human history, on a par with Pontius Pilate. It seemed they had more in common with the woman with a radio in her head than with any group worthy of Theroux’s time and talent. Also, thankfully, there are only a couple of dozen of the deeply unpleasant Phelps clan – a minuscule minority not worth the oxygen of publicity.

THERE'LL BE A large gap to plug in Monday's viewing now that University Challengeis over for another year. It's been a steady though not vintage season, with no personalities emerging or on-screen rows breaking out. Last year there was shock when the winning team captain challenged quizmaster Jeremy Paxman, who had said "good guess" to one of the answers. "It wasn't a guess," snipped the captain. Sharp intake of breath all round – that's what passes as shocking in the refined world of University Challenge.

It’s been a good year: watching Paxman staring witheringly at some teenager who had incorrectly answered “Charles I” with a look that said “every fool knows its Charles II”; trying – and failing miserably – to pitch yourself against the extraordinarily clever contestants (except, of course, in the pure maths rounds, because you’d need a brain the size of Pluto to tackle them).

The final featured York University versus Magdalen College, Oxford and you’d have to be up for York, not only because they weren’t as downright pleased with themselves as their fancy-pants opponents but also because you can’t mispronounce their name and come off sounding like a pleb the way you can with Magdalen. York bottled it at 80 points and the winners went on to clock up a huge 250 points. Handing out the trophy, the historian Antony Beevor said that the competition is a triumphant rebuke to critics who say universities are full of students who know only the subject they study.

The big unanswered questions are why so few female students are drawn to take part and why the final was an all-male affair.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

What not to miss next week

True Stories: Guilty Pleasures(More4, Tuesday) The nurse always marries the doctor, the geek frog turns out to be a prince and there's a bit of harmless bodice-ripping. Sneer if you want, but, as this documentary shows, Mills & Boon books sell more than 200 million copies every year.