Television Review

IRONY IS the enemy of art. It blurs the lines between high and low, good and bad. Under cover of irony, intelligent people can pretend to find significance in The Archers, elegance in flared trousers and wit in Birds of a Feather. Irony can let cliches pass as jokes, and make timidity look like astringent scepticism.

This Is Modern Art (C4) is armour-plated with irony. According to Matthew Collings, even the name is intended "in a kind of ironic, doubtful way, because no one knows what modern art really is". Collings himself shelters behind a lot of ironic retro references - Roy Orbison specs, Elvis sideburns, a leather coat that hints at Tony Curtis in The Persuaders - and a blokey, jokey manner.

Every so often he takes a quizzical, sidelong glance at the whole business of doing art on television: in the Picasso Museum in Paris, he began by noting the "not unfamiliar" sight of a critic waddling through the museum waving his arms about, then went on to do precisely that. Later, while the cameras roamed through a supermarket stuffed with exactly the kind of comestibles Andy Warhol used to paint, Collings (in voiceover) referred to the book Andy Warhol's Philosophy from A to B and Back Again. "I expect I'll be coming round one of these aisles and reading extracts from it at any moment, if this ironic, easy-listening soundtrack is anything to go by," he said; and next second, there he was, book in hand.

Collings is an amiable, even charming guide, and clearly not stupid; and this first programme was packed with useful information about the lives of the great artists (well, about the lives of Picasso, Pollock and Warhol) and their historical significance. For the most part, he was more interested in discussing myths about the artists - Pollock as tortured wildman, Picasso as "Mr Lovepants" - than in offering any critical perspective on the art. When he did pass judgement, it was of an uncontroversial sort (Picasso, we learned, was "a genius"; Warhol was "a genius - but of a new kind"); and you started to get the impression that the irony and the biography were ways for Collings to avoid sticking his neck out. Perhaps this was just as well: at the beginning, in thoroughly unironic mode, he made some pretty vacuous connections between Picasso and BritArt in the Nineties. Sarah Lucas, of the fruit 'n' veg genitals creations, was allowed to get away with saying that she identified with Picasso, "I mean just in terms of the amount of sex in his work" - a remark that allows us to place Picasso in a tradition with Benny Hill and Penthouse.

The effects of irony were also rather too visible in All for Love (BBC1). This costume drama was taken from an (unfinished) novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, which was promising, and featured Richard E Grant, which is always a hallmark of quality (dang! there's the irony creeping in). It was a good deal more stylish to look at than the recent Scarlet Pimpernel, but had the same faults: it couldn't bring itself to be a wholehearted swashbuckler, but lacked the pace and the humour to bring off pastiche. In the end, it was straightforwardly tedious. And I mean that most sincerely.