On TV

Mary Seacole: the Real Angel of the Crimea (C4)

The Story of ITV: the People's Channel (ITV1)

IF there's a more watchable actor on television than Bill Nighy, I've yet to see him. Every twitch, every flicker, every glance - his gestures are loaded with so much character and emotion, usually repressed, they are almost overwhelming. Nighy brings an extra physical dimension to his roles, while staying just on the right side of parody.

In The Girl in the Caf, Nighy played Lawrence, a shy and socially awkward 57-year-old civil servant who one day sat opposite Kelly Macdonald's young-enough-to-be-his-daughter Gina in a cafe. Tentatively and clumsily, they began an unlikely romance.

But their love story was nowhere near as clumsy as the tale which ran parallel. As it happened, Lawrence was an advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Third World poverty, and his meeting with Gina came just weeks before a crucial G8 summit in Reykjavik. Perhaps unwisely, Lawrence asked Gina to accompany him to Reykjavik. The stage was set for a diatribe against poverty and injustice, ahead of the real G8 summit next month.

Writer Richard Curtis is not known for his subtlety - witness the sledgehammer approach to emotion in Love, Actually - but The Girl in the Caf was of a different order. It wasn't so much laying it on with a trowel, as unloading it from a dumper truck.

All this is very laudable, of course, and it may seem churlish to complain when the film's heart is in the right place, as well as on its sleeve, but it made you wonder how much more effective it would have been in more delicate hands.

There were the usual Curtis trademarks. The excruciating scene, a la Rowan Atkinson's vicar in Four Weddings. The tearjerker, the little homily, they were all there. It was only saved from complete mawkishness by the mesmerising performances of Nighy and Macdonald, and a superb supporting cast including Ken Stott's Chancellor, but the overall effect made Bob Geldof seem reticent.

But then that's probably how Curtis seems alongside Mary Seacole. The Jamaican-born hotelier who became a nurse in the Crimean War is one of the largest of larger-than-life figures. Turned down as a nurse by Florence Nightingale, here represented as a rather prissy and distant figure, she nevertheless ministered to the soldiers on the battlefield, complete with garish feathered hats.

Many of her remedies were her own discoveries, and although derided by the medical establishment at the time, she had far greater success in curing anything from diarrhoea from cholera. But her British Hotel, set up far closer to the front that Nightingale ever dared venture, administered not just medicine, but alcohol and entertainment besides. The extortionate prices she charged subsidised her free medicines, and endeared her to soldiers suffering the immense hardship of the Crimean War.

Nor did they forget her when the war was over, even though she was bankrupted by its end, when her stock became worthless. In 1857, a year after her return to London, Crimea veterans organised a four day gala, which attracted some 80,000 people, to raise money for the now penniless widow. Queen Victoria even donated £50 to her pension, much to Nightingale's disgust.

But, as the title of Mary Seacole: the Real Angel of the Crimea suggested, her role has been somewhat diminished over the years, partly as a result of racism, which saw her efforts to volunteer rejected by the War Office, and partly due to the disapproval of her methods, by Nightingale and others. It was only when her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, was republished in the 1980s, that she again started to receive the attention she deserved.

It's a life which deserves a feature film, but in the meantime, this mixture of drama and documentary was a more than adequate substitute. It may even have been the sort of thing ITV would have made into a mini-series, in the days before soaps and reality television took over the third channel.

The Story of ITV: the People's Channel was the first in a six part series marking the channel's 50th anniversary. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, it set the scene for a trawl through the archives and a celebration of ITV's glory days, with a look at how Britain's first commercial channel got off the ground.

Despite BBC efforts to scupper the opening night, killing off Grace Archer in a fire, audiences loved the new channel, which provided a more relaxed alternative to the somewhat stuffy Auntie. But while Bragg's appearance suggested the anniversary was an occasion for serious analysis, the main pleasure for most viewers would have been in the nostalgia factor