Television (Review): Where syntax is a stiletto at the throat

LAST WEEK'S Alan Bleasdale Presents (C4) showed how difficult recommendations can be. Self-Catering was a disappointment - too long and languorous, too lazy about its appropriations of wit, too lavishly produced. But it was partly a disappointment because it came with that crushing imprimatur. It was difficult to suppress your expectations - to stop yourself from speculating about the next generation or testing the script for Bleasdalian qualities. A play which might have charmed in more modest form, which certainly would have had more of its sins forgiven, was reviewed almost as if it had been written by Bleasdale, rather than just sponsored by him. That leaves a long way to drop if you fall short.

Raymond Murtagh's Requiem Apache, this week's offering, fared much better, despite offering some striking similarities to Self-Catering. It's beginning to be possible, at least, to identify some elements of Bleasdale's taste. As in last week's play, the language was mannered and elliptical, full of self-conscious echoes and relished verbosity. It's a sort of Psychotic Baroque, in which hired killers express themselves with menacing grammatical exactitude, as if syntax

was a stiletto, touched to your interlocutor's throat. The characters test phrases for their ambiguity and they notice puns - 'You must have a float in the swimming pool,' snorts Kenneth Cranham,

arguing with a leisure-centre cashier who can't give him change for a tenner.

To this self-conscious cleverness, cool to the point of being chilly, Murtagh added a touch of warmth and conscience which was lacking from the sour vision of Self-Catering. This takes the form of Alfred Molina and a baby. Actually, when you think about it, Molina's charm as an actor is rather like that of a baby, a very hairy one. He has a slow-blinking, almost stupefied innocence which is entirely endearing, even when applied to unsympathetic characters. It was a fine piece of casting because his characteristic air of long suffering was perfectly attuned to the strategy of the plot, in which Molina's character - a getaway driver who wants to retire - endures mounting indignities with a mysterious passivity. 'Trust me,' he told his wife, 'I know when to wait and I know when to go.' He was reassuring the viewer too, and he kept his word, paying off all debts in a final flurry of satisfying resolution. Requiem Apache wasn't perfect - to do the unfair thing, and compare it to Bleasdale, its emotions seemed applied rather than through-written - but you were glad you'd been introduced.

'Here's something that oozes quality,' said a man in Natural Neighbours (BBC 1), lifting a pig's tail to show a well- scrubbed piggy bottom. It oozes other things too, you thought, but his blithe ingenuousness was a good illustration of the blind affection pigs can inspire. 'We've really crushed their potential,' said another woman, who keeps two large pigs as house pets. I'm fond of pigs myself - of their winning indifference to looks and diet - but this made me blink a bit. Did her pigs have a sense of thwarted ambition (did they want to be all a pig can be?) or did she just mean that humans weren't getting the best out of them by turning them into bacon?

The programme itself was rather irritating - narrated in a snuffly, snorty sort of way by Griff Rhys Jones (hamming it up, I suppose) and proceeding without any very obvious purpose.

It rooted and grubbed until it found something tasty, munched it down and then moved on to the next novelty. This resulted in some nice pictures and general sense of piggy cuteness, but you didn't really feel they had done the

animal justice.