Kingdom ITV1, 9pm Bring back Dallas Channel 4, 9pm Seven Ages of Rock BBC2, 9.05pm (Saturday)
SO. Farewell, then, Peter Kingdom , a lawyer much too sage and sweet and saintly - and unconcerned by money - ever to be a lawyer in real life. And farewell Market Shipborough, couthy seaside East Anglian home to all the other kindly-but-eccentric members of the Kingdom family. Farewell - for now.
Kingdom signed off with Peter's teasing query ("You b*****d! Where are you?") about the mysterious Simon, his absent brother. Plainly, this unanswered question was just a means of priming us for Kingdom's reappearance in a second series of reassuring Sunday-night viewing. After all, 5.59 million Kingdom-watchers - a top-10 audience that's more than Dalziel and Pascoe, less than Holby City - can't be ignored.
There were other unanswered questions about Kingdom, too. Chiefly, did I drop off and miss the announcement of the winner of the rudest-shaped vegetable competition at Market Shipborough Harvest Festival, as judged by Peter Kingdom? Did victory go to the tumescent carrot? Or the pulchritudinous parsnip?
And why did staid smoulderer Gloria and bonkers hotty Beatrice briefly metamorphose into Thelma and Louise by donning headscarves and going off to the beach in Peter's 1967 drophead Alvis?
Mature ladies both, their marine excursion resulted in a flirtation with some teenage surf-bums that was most unconvincing.
There was much that was unconvincing, too, about Bring Back Dallas , Justin Lee Collins's latest bid to convince us he has dramatically-limited time in which to engineer some 1970s tellybiz reunion. Exactly as he did while en route to reuniting the extant members of The A Team, JLC kept breathlessly telling us how time was against him and he'd never bring together the stars of Dallas.
But then he did. Of course. Most of them. With the odd exception. Probably. OK, OK, here I must confess I gave up shortly after JLC ran down the actor who played Dallas's all-time loser, Cliff Barnes, Ken Kercheval. Poor Ken's most recent gig was in a cheesy wintertime stage revue, White Christmas, at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton.
Ken's reminiscences about Dallas were less than fresh and not totally riveting. "I can remember the first time the cast got together wherever we got together," Ken recalled of Dallas, less than convincingly.
What hellish ill-luck reduces a 70-something American actor, 30 years after he finds fame on a globally-networked TV drama, to mumming in a Christmas show that's less than a panto in Southampton? Dunno.
Justin Lee Collins didn't think to ask Ken this, the single most interesting thing about his career, so we never found out.
We found out who Justin Lee Collins is. He's a comic with a full beard and a lovely mane of hair, and he says vulgar and bombastic things while shaking or tousling his lovely mane of hair: JLC is thus a more crass, less discriminating Billy Connolly. Not a good thing to be.
Profiling art-rock, Seven Ages of Rock had too much Pink Floyd and Genesis, and insufficient Roxy Music, Bowie and Velvet Underground. Unforgivably, too, the documentary's narration described the Velvets' most able musician as "the British musician John Cale". He's Welsh!
Elsewhere, the show reminded you that Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry was best when he didn't blink and that Pink Floyd acid casualty Syd Barrett pioneered great songs about transvestites. Pete Doherty? Pah!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must don silver eye-shadow, bronze-coloured tights and gold lipstick while singing about losing my sense of self in front of a kick-ass band of navvies likewise attired. I will not blink. The world will momentarily cease spinning on its axis. Make Pete Doherty history!
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