Television: Production values - There's nothing like a talking head

If ever you find yourself pitching a factual television idea to a commissioning editor, you can give it an initial free bunk up the greasy pole by promising that it will contain no interviews. "Talking heads" - a phrase from which neither Alan Bennet nor rock music could draw the venom - are believed, not completely wrongly, to have an unbeatable power to bore.

Yet, despite the talk, few factual programmes actually get off the ground without including interviews. Talking to people is as good a source of information in film as it is in real life.

The trick is to film interviews so that the pictures say something as well. Horizon: Chimps on Death Row (BBC2, Thursday) set Jane Goodall, the scientist who pioneered the study of chimpanzee social behaviour, in an eloquent location. A wide shot found her in a room clearly intended for quiet study and reasoned discussion, while leafy trees moved constantly against the window.

Sam Roberts chose to end his finely balanced moral slow burn of a programme with her remarks about the responsibility we bear towards experimental animals. She spoke with the considered passion which shows itself as calm; but it was her setting, contrasting with the collection of laptops, labs and bookcases which backed the other speakers, that gave her thoughts the edge, and gave the programme itself a share of her authority. Congratulations to BBC Science for leading with this and not the dinosaur programme with obvious mid-Atlantic appeal which came up second in the running order.

Perhaps surprisingly, talking heads are also the stuff of which Rock Family Trees (Fridays, BBC2) is made. These epic tales of musicians moving from squalid struggle to tawdry celebrity are constructed of only three elements: a little music video, a lot of talking head, and shots of inanimate objects.

Series producer Francis Hanly keeps the programmes true to his chosen style even when, as in the case of this week's Manchester film, more conventional shots of buildings and streets would have been readily obtainable. The effect of this discipline is to make the talking heads more absorbing.

We have, for example, a chance to examine the assortment of gold discs, amplifiers, and odd knick-knacks which fill out the backgrounds. At their best these objects take on the function which was intended for the symbolic lilies, peacocks, and enclosed gardens which litter medieval portraits of the saints: to aid meditation by providing a secure resting place for the flitting mind.

Objects - old tickets, discs, copies of New Musical Express - laid out on the family tree itself, like the table cloth the fates have woven for them, also provide the pictures for the parts of the story that have to be told in commentary. This avoids predictable rostrum shots of newspaper headlines as well as allowing for another layer of meaning: if Citizen Kane had been a rock star we would see a sledge called Rosebud on the table.

In the final sequence each interviewee sits, aware that they are being filmed but without talking, while captions tell us where they are now.

Some smile, some remain rigid, and some clown around. These are talking heads with the talk taken out, and they reward the viewer with an extra helping of insight - a satisfying end to a compelling drama, economically told.

The fact that last week's programme could include the tragic suicide of Joy Division's singer Ian Curtis without looking in any way distorted by an event of such seriousness is a measure of the well-roundedness of that drama. If you don't believe me, try imagining the same event being covered in a docusoap.