TELEVISION / The house that Joe built: James Rampton on The Kennedys and Shakespeare

Hardly a week seems to pass without some new book or film exclusively revealing that JFK was a Venusian who was murdered by a sect of Morris Dancing Martians. This week's contribution, The Kennedys (ITV), two and half years in the making, rescues 'America's Royal Family' from such National Enquirer-style speculation and re-establishes them as historical fact.

Philip Whitehead, the producer of Thames's four-hour investigation, managed to avoid the failing of many historical documentary- makers in whose hands too much research can be a dangerous thing. 'Nine Hostages to Fortune', the first part, was meaty without being indigestible.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of morsels to tempt trivia-bingers. You can but admire the researcher who must have ploughed through miles of home movie footage to come up with pictures of JFK yawning by the swimming- pool under a pile of books entitled Why England Slept, and who discovered that Jack was listening to Finian's Rainbow on the day his sister Kathleen died.

But the bulk of the programme was devoted to JFK's father, Joseph, who, when he failed to become king, turned kingmaker. Here the meticulous research was at its most illuminating. The ferocious competitiveness of the Irish American outsider first manifested itself when he defied convention in the Harvard / Yale baseball game by refusing to hand over the ball to his captain after making the winning catch ('What Joe won, he kept,' observed narrator John Woodvine). He went on to earn many a quick buck on the stock market using tactics straight out of Trading Places. Before this, viewers might well have felt sated with the story of the Kennedys; perhaps the real achievement of the first course in this four-part feast was that it left you hungry for more.

The only person to have been the subject of more conspiracy theories than the Kennedys is Shakespeare. In Shakespeare - Or What You Will, part of Without Walls (C4), the premise was not that the Bard was several people or a woman, as has previously been suggested, but that he displayed homosexual tendencies. Those bracing themselves for a rehearsed reading of Luvvies, The Complete Works will have been pleasantly surprised. As it turned out, Simon Callow, seated on a commodious leather armchair with a balloon glass of brandy at his elbow, marshalled some convincing evidence for the theory - particularly from the sonnets.

But the actor's case was too often marred by overstatement. We had understood that Iago's speech about Cassio's dream from Othello was homoerotic long before it was underlined by shots of two winsome young men with crew cuts and tattoos snogging in bed. 'To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.'