Television: Last Night

For anyone who thinks that four-letter words and nudity can bring a society to its knees, you can see that The Granton Star Cause (C4) might prove an unsettling three-quarters of an hour. The Daily Mail probably assigned someone to count the obscenities - but I gave up when I ran out of toes, which was about 40 seconds into the film. This sort of verbal blizzard doesn't upset me, but it wouldn't be fair to the film-makers to pretend to a complete insouciance about the content of this assiduously offensive fable, about a Glasgow no-hoper called Boab. I looked away queasily when two flies dined on a glistening turd to the sound of Frank Sinatra, and I own up to finding Boab's parents' sex scene a bit disconcerting (though it was funny to see his ma unstrap the dildo for a maternal chat with her daughter on the phone - "Oh just the usual... aye... ye ken us," she coos, when asked what she's been up to. Her husband is leaning against the mantelpiece wearing a black nylon slip as she speaks).

The film as a whole wasn't quite as funny as the defensive pre-publicity would have you believe, though it certainly had its moments - when Boab rounds off a dismal day by being arrested for vandalism (he has first been dropped by his football team, kicked out by his parents and dumped by his girlfriend), he is beaten up by a policeman who owns British Telecom shares and takes a dim view of his investment being jeopardised. You can see that the Daily Mail might not see the funny side of that either, but they would surely have approved of God's short, sharp way with Boab. After scornfully abusing him in the kind of language he understands, He berates him for his spineless lack of self-discipline: "Ye had the powers - ye just could'nae be bothered using them." Boab is then turned into a bluebottle, and vengefully visits food poisoning on all his enemies, a plot development which gave full scope to Paul McGuigan's gleefully impure, try-anything- once direction. I quite enjoyed its essentially adolescent charms, but I'm glad it's not my job to justify it to an enraged MP.

"Gold-dust, those boys, Ray. Nice tune, too." This description of Robson and Jerome is offered by a chalk-striped wideboy in Ain't Misbehavin' (ITV), but one imagines a similar phrase must have passed through the minds of the people who run Clapp-Trapp Productions. Only the profit motive could account for this calculated assembly of big-band hits, wartime drama and caper movie - the resulting tone being a blend of a tourist "Blitz Experience" and Film Fun, a Forties comic in which recognisable celebrities were inserted into comic-strip adventures. Robson and Jerome are halfway to being cartoons already, part of their appeal (I'm guessing here, you understand) being the rather graphic nature of their acting, which consists of a set of comforting facial signposts. Robson has two particular trademarks: saying things through gritted teeth while not looking at the person he's speaking to, and a mechanical smile which flicks on and off his face when he gets into a scrape. Jerome's trademark is the absence of any expression whatsoever - his broad, flat face forming an open space on which the audience can do a bit of emotional flyposting. The scriptwriters may have leaned a little too heavily on this asset by making his character subject to fits, during which he freezes completely for minutes at a time.

The drama itself is a collation of period favourites - Warren Mitchell says "Lor, luv a duck"; there is a comical East End landlady, a menacing Glasgow gangster and a troubled romance between Jerome and Julia Sawalha's posh nurse, whose rather mumsy charms don't seem to warrant his convention- defying persistence ("I'll go on one condition... Tell me you really love Roger"). There are also Robson's mother's matchmaking efforts, gang rivalry and a budding autumnal love affair. In fact, the plot is as crammed as a black-marketeer's suitcase - and even so, there's nothing you really feel like buying.