The goodbye girls

TV Review: Given that this is an election year, From Ardoyne to the Áras: Inside the McAleese Presidency needed to avoid being a corporate video. It didn't. This was her tenure pressed into fine treacle. The muzak swelled as she spoke. "Friendships . . . partnerships . . . energising . . . flying on two wings."

It was an old-fashioned documentary; more an extended news report, in fact. It was worthy but dull. The film, I mean, not McAleese's presidency.

It was a medley of her most memorable moments mixed with a little personal access, at home and on the road as our saleswoman-in-chief. The result was little of real insight, other than its look at Dr Martin McAleese's quiet work with the loyalist community. There was the odd good anecdote. In the early days, for instance, it proved very difficult for the McAleese family to order a Chinese takeaway. All would go well until they would be asked for an address. The phone would be dead before you'd get to clear your throat on the first syllable of "Uachtaráin".

The cameras were in China when the ceiling collapsed, an accident that seemed to invigorate journalists who were, perhaps, glad of the change in crumbling scenery. Sometimes events don't always go according to plan, we were told. A Minister of State was late for one, we saw. Calm down, dear reader. He made it.

There were minor concessions to dissent. One journalist questioned the absence of civil rights on the agenda when she visited China. She took a little stick from a disgruntled loyalist while in Belfast and from a drunken man on a visit to a Lions Club dinner for the homeless. Otherwise, the film achieved little other than to pose questions over the timing of this exercise. Although, with the President making no comment on whether she will stay or go, it did make you wonder if someone so adept at reaching out from within a straitjacket would want another seven years in it.

However, as Marys go, she could have it worse. Jimmy McGovern, who brought us the recent histories of Bloody Sunday and the Hillsborough stadium disaster, has reached further back for Gunpowder, Treason and Plot. The first two episodes told the story of Mary Queen of Scots. It was national history as domestic drama: a queen with a disloyal half-brother, drunken husband and twitchy cousin, Elizabeth I. Mary was a Catholic queen of a Protestant country; desperate to be a calming mother to unruly children. The late arrival of a Minister of State in such circumstance might have suggested treason rather than tardiness.

Mary was played by French actress Clémence Poésy. McGovern prettified history somewhat. In reality, Mary's famous beauty quickly gave way to wretchedness born of disease and gathering mania. Black mucus oozed from her face. She wandered in and out of a manic trance. Not so in this treatment. Poésy was pristine, with such a precious neck, rather as if an axe might only shatter it.

As her extra-marital lover and loyal guard the Earl of Bothwell, Kevin McKidd was an intense ginger Gael, his brow gathering over his eyes like a threatening rock-fall. As is fashionable, McGovern's script is an old tale told in modern words, so that the period is regularly jolted by incongruity. In a Scottish accent, it takes on a certain impudence. As reward for his loyalty, Mary offered Bothwell anything he wanted. "I want ya nekkid," he replied. "In ma bed!" And a can of Irn Bru, please.

Anyway, Mary had a child, who next week will grow up to become King James I. More accurately, next week he will grow up to find that he is Robert Carlyle, and he will spend the rest of the drama being most furious about it.

Sex and the City came to an end this week. Charlotte got a baby, Miranda got a sick mother-in-law, Carrie got rescued and Samantha got an orgasm. They each seemed pretty happy with their lot. As is the usual case, the best stories happened away from the distraction of Carrie's rampant outfits and Samantha and Miranda, especially, enjoyed a couple of quite beautiful valedictory moments. As for Carrie, it was from Paris that she needed saving.

It was a city in which everything from her boyfriend's ex-wife to the cobbled streets sneered at her American frivolity. Her boyfriend was Mikhail Baryshnikov, but even the novelty of this didn't make up for the French ennui that was rotting away at her consumer spirit. Anyway, she made it back to the New York shallows just in time and this was a finely tuned closing episode that shrugged away the many loose ends with a cute swing of the hips. But then, it has quit before it became a parody of itself. Although, given Carrie's taste in much older men, there's a chance that in only a few years' time she may have to go through the single woman thing again.

Nighty Night began with a diagnosis of cancer, ended with a suicide and sought no respite in between. It's a comedy. Its writer Julia Davis plays Jill, a sociopathic hairdresser whose husband is undergoing chemotherapy while she's trawling through the books of a dating agency. She finds it more comforting to tell people that he's died, even if her story veers a little in the details. "He passed away yesterday evening, in the small hours of the morning." She has become smitten with her new neighbour. He is played by Angus Deayton, fresh from tabloid scandal but looking utterly stale here. With beard and mothballed wardrobe he looks thoroughly beaten, perhaps not having to scratch too deep to release his misanthropic stench. His wife is crippled with MS, but his well of empathy is dry. He has a disregard for her condition that is so casual she has yet to recognise it. They had a scene involving a neck brace and fellatio that was far more subtle and telling than such a crude description suggests.

With a cast of grotesques, Nighty Night lies in the same lice-ridden bed as League of Gentlemen (whose Mark Gattis cameoed as a creepy blind date) and Davis's previous outing, Human Remains. This is not comedy that people will love, but it is very funny.

Although, it's not yet as funny as Black Books. This week, Bernard (Dylan Moran) and Manny (Bill Bailey) resolved to write a children's book. They had been heartened by the poor quality of the competition.

Bernard, flicking through pages: "Ball, duck, umbrella - on and on it goes . . ." Manny: ". . . with no hint of plot." Following a tortuous stretching of their creativity, they came up with a 1,000-page masterpiece featuring an academic, the Stalinist purges and a lens grinder in Omsk; but on reconsideration, changed that to a story about an elephant who had lost his balloon. As an episode, it was up there alongside the one in which they attempted to remake a vintage wine and ended up poisoning the Pope. As a series, this third one proves that it has lost none of its dark brilliance and that Moran has re-asserted himself as king of the misanthropes. All hail.

This is Ireland featured a roll call of those comedians responsible for the recent renaissance in Irish television comedy: Michael McElhatton, Colin Murphy, Deirdre O'Kane, Pat Shortt and Risteard Cooper, all in a pilot sketch show written by a team that included Arthur Mathews. How can it go wrong, you asked yourself; just before you realised that it somehow hadn't turned out right.

In the deep end of the schedules, late last night, this was a mock magazine programme: Nationwide as if aware of its own absurdity. So it featured newsreel footage dubbed with new commentary and fake news reports, such as one in which a reporter investigated the underworld practice of playing live animals as musical instruments.

It openly acknowledged a debt to Monty Python as it took a swingeing surrealism to an Irish setting, but the ideas were stretched thin despite the talent. It was like a recipe from which you realised the chef had omitted an ingredient only when the whole thing arrived out of the oven flaccid. However, it succeeded in its soap 'The Driordans', in which the concerns of 1960s Ireland were played out against the backdrop of nuclear holocaust. "This nuclear war is up and running," said Da Driordan as he came in for his tea. "It's something different, I suppose."