TELEVISION / Your name in lights

THE PROBLEM with Fame, at least as a subject for a television series, is that it's a bit too famous. How many cheap biographies have we read of Fame, how many trashy biopics and newspaper supplements telling us how it wrecks lives, how it sucks any sense of solid identity from its victim, how it feeds on itself, how it lives in a gilded cage? We know less about Madonna than we do about Fame.

This hasn't deterred Clive James (who has fluttered close to this particular candle in previous documentaries) from returning for a magisterial shot at the subject - the blockbuster cap-it-all study, complete with footnotes. On the evidence of last night's introductory episode Fame (BBC 1) doesn't look as if it is going to illuminate any hitherto darkened corners of the concept but at least the light that plays over it will sparkle and glitter.

This is part of the problem, of course - glittering light isn't the best sort by which to examine something closely and there were several moments when you couldn't quite tell whether you'd seen a flash of truth or just a flash of wit. James' comic style has a tendency to put the content of his sentences into fancy-dress, rendering the profound and the shallow difficult to tell apart. More than once you wanted to see these ideas in their formal clothes, rather than the novelty hats and Hawaiian shirts they are forced to adopt for their appearances on prime-time.

The uneasy wobble between the didactic and the antic was emphasised by the fact that James has chosen the BBC's grandest ex cathedra mode for his thesis. This was essentially a studio lecture with moving slides - a brisk history of celebrity delivered over a montage of archive film. James occasionally appears, to confer an A J P Taylor-like gravitas to the the whole affair, but for the most part you are dependent on his voice alone, that familiar drone of calculated naivety and sardonic variation ('If he was just an act he was a hard act to follow,' he noted of Reagan).

His pitch, much compressed, is that 20th-century fame is an entirely new invention, a creature of the technologies of film and recorded sound. The arguments for this sometimes seemed to have been omitted in the rush (he simply defined his terms to suit his case in a couple of places) but the broad shape of the idea had a slow-burning persistance which isn't always true of sweeping cultural assertions. Though Dickens was wildly famous in his time he was essentially famous to his readers, to those, paradoxically, who knew him already; Madonna is famous even to those who would wonder where you put the needle on a compact disc. Sarah Bernhardt might have been world famous as an actress but Garbo was famous as an idea, given flesh by that iconic face.

Some of this was an act of dissemination rather than original thought (there was a lot of Barthes during the passages on Garbo, for instance) but amongst the jokes about old-fashioned moustaches and the verbal pirouettes there were other ideas which niggled at you after the credits had rolled. James pointed out that the development of the close- up in cinema gave a new meaning to the phrase 'larger than life' (indeed, agents often dictate how many close-ups will occur in their clients roles, aware that technique and fame are indivisible).

He was provoking too about the creation of individuals - Lawrence of Arabia and the Red Baron - who could squeeze the experience of the First World War, a drama with millions of walk-ons and almost no stars, into the cinema frame. God alone knows, though, how he's going to spin it out for another seven episodes.

An apology finally for inadvertently depriving Craig Charles of his own fair share of fame. It was he, not Craig Thomas as stated, who presented Cyberzone (BBC 2).