The Weekend's TV: Inside Hamas, C4 <br />Tropic of Capricorn, BBC2

That now-celebrated remark by Mario Cuomo about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose has to be adjusted slightly for Hamas, the militant Palestinian organisation, which won control of the Palestinian Authority in the 2006 elections. With Hamas, it would need to run something more like, "Campaign in bullets and explosives and govern in... well... er... riot gear, with pickaxe handles available for those occasions when we don't actually want to kill the electorate." It's always a tricky transition, this: beating your sword into a loose-leaf ring binder filled with details about refuse disposal and street-trading ordinances, and Rodrigo Vazquez's intriguing film, Inside Hamas, suggested that the organisation is not having a particularly easy time weathering the shift from popular heroes to administrative whipping boys. This is not, it has to be said, a source of great regret to anybody but the poor beleaguered people of Gaza (and if you're inclined to say, "Well, they got what they voted for," that's true), but then they didn't have a lot of choice at the time.

Even veteran Hamas members aren't always happy with how the organisation is doing in power. "A responsible leader should be ashamed for making us do this," muttered a disaffected member of the Executive Force, Hamas's home-grown police force, after clearing illegal stallholders out of a local square. But the locals' disillusionment with their new leaders is often far fiercer. "You are the cause of our hunger... not the occupation," shouted one protester, campaigning against the tightening economic conditions. And after Hamas policemen had beaten people praying outside their mosques, in protest at the political manipulation of the pulpits, a furious old lady went even further. "Shame on you," she screeched, "You're worse than the Jews." "Whatever happens to remove Hamas from power, they cannot remove us from the hearts of the people," the former Hamas "prime minister" Ismael Haniya had boasted earlier in the film, but on the evidence of this film "they" didn't need to do anything at all. Hamas was doing a perfectly good job of destroying its own popularity.

Vazquez's access here was sometimes difficult to construe. He'd clearly been allowed to film by the Hamas authorities and some scenes had the flavour of a calculated photo opportunity, as when a female MP, Huda Naim, met senior party officials to put the case against the violent break-up of opposition protests. On another occasion, one Hamas policemen was angrily demanding that the cameraman stop filming while his colleagues intervened to protect the crew. But if some Hamas press attaché had calculated that media transparency would help to present the organisation in a new and flattering light, he or she had miscalculated. The private candour of ordinary Palestinians kept chipping away at the fiction of popular solidarity that Hamas would like to present. In public, the mother of a young Hamas soldier killed while across the border congratulated her dead son on his recent martyrdom. In private, she acknowledged that it was simply a waste of a life. And, more tellingly, the father of a young boy killed by an Israeli missile aimed at a rocket-launching site failed to toe the party line on valiant Palestinian resistance. "To claim that these rockets are a response is comical... people should be ashamed." The thought occurred that Hamas, politically dependent on a siege mentality and the frustrated anger of ordinary Palestinians, has a lot more to gain from a dead Palestinian child than Israel has.

In Tropic of Capricorn, Simon Reeve set out on another lateral circumnavigation of the globe, presumably having deferred the Tropic of Cancer as too much of a health hazard right now. The northern line of latitude runs through some of the more dangerous and volatile regions on the planet, whereas the southern one takes you through Madagascar, French Polynesia, Australia and South America. That said, Capricorn isn't without its hazards. In Namibia, for example, Reeve went into the bush with an improbably handsome French naturalist and found himself surrounded on all sides by hungry cheetahs, a tricky moment in itself, but even more anxiety-inducing if your pockets are full of freshly slaughtered springbok. And in Windhoek, he very nearly drank himself into a coma trying to keep pace with the Chinese businessman who are busy staging a quiet recolonisation of Africa.

The itinerary in this first episode had a little too much of the government information film about it: visiting a brick factory in Namibia and a diamond-sorting shed and government health clinic in Botswana. But Reeve is a very likeable travelling partner, with a handy gift for making the locals laugh, and he doesn't skip the awkward stuff, such as the Botswanan government's unwelcome obsession with helping the San people of the Kalahari into the 21st century, a period for which they show very little obvious relish. Indeed, judging from their life in the bush, they're not really all that interested in any century that made it into double figures. Next week, lemurs!

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk