Weekend TV

Christopher Foyle is the latest detective to arrive on the small screen heralded as "the new Morse". The verdict as to whether he'll match up to the real ale-drinking Oxford sleuth remains open on the evidence of the first episode.

The omens must be good if only because the format combines two popular TV genres - the whodunit and nostalgic period drama.

Creator and writer Anthony Horowitz, who is also behind Midsomer Murders, knows what he's doing. Dead bodies and period costumes, who could ask for anything more?

Well, a bit more pace would help, for a start. Filling the two-hour slot meant the plot was stretched more than the elastic on the knickers of a Celebrity Fit Club star. It seemed to last longer than the Second World War, the period in which Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle operates.

The poor chap wanted to do his bit for king and country, but his application to join the war effort was turned down. Happily, there was plenty to occupy his attention on the home front down on the South Coast where murder, like rationing, seems to be a way of life (and death).

The enemy within was the theme of the first mystery set in a village, already on edge after a stray Luftwaffe bomb falls on the village pub in Lower Fenton. Foyle's skills of detection were needed when a wealthy landowner's German wife was killed while out riding, virtually beheaded by a length of piano wire stretched between two trees.

More than one person muttered something about "one more dead German" being of no consequence, but Foyle (played by Michael Kitchen with a suitable air of authority crossed with bafflement) knows his duty: "I'm a policeman, here to do a job. Murder is murder."

Everything in Foyle's War was explained in detail several times in case any viewer had dropped off.

Poet, actor and dramatist Harold Pinter, on the other hand, never explains anything. It's no wonder, as someone in Arena's two-part documentary pointed out, that the question he's asked most is, "What does it mean?"

Pinter isn't saying, although the programme used an intriguing method of detection to discover how his dramatic imagination works. Taking its cue from the title of an early play The Room, it revisited the places where he lived and wrote. There, they followed the clues suggesting where people and places featured in his work originated. He seems to be a man who remembers particular images and develops them into plays.

We were also reminded that, although words such as enigmatic, mysterious and bewildering are used regularly to describe his stage plays, at one point his TV plays were seen by eight to ten million people on a Sunday evening. Presumably, they would not have watched if they were that baffled.

Pinter maintained, in one clip, that "in the past ten years I have never stopped giving interviews". All the same, the programme-makers had to make do with clips from his speeches made at award ceremonies, political demonstrations and other public occasions. They did unearth a TV interview from 1969 in which Pinter, lounging on a red sofa, says: "I don't really know much about what audiences think. I don't know much about people. I don't know more about people than anyone else does. I just know about the characters I write about."

I doubt if even Foyle's powers of detection could get Pinter to come clean about his work.