TV Preview

Joanna Lumley: in the Land of the Northern Lights Sunday, BBC1, 9pm A Number Wednesday, BBC2, 9pm The 9/11 Hotel Wednesday, Channel 4, 9pm The 9/11 Faker Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm

ONCE, WHILE ON HOLIDAY IN Sweden, I was fortunate enough to witness the Northern Lights. It was probably the only time in my life when I've ever felt anything approaching awe (the only other time, but for entirely different reasons, was when I recently watched that episode of Bonekickers with the saintly Barack Obama clone).



So I can understand perfectly Joanna Lumley's emotional reaction to seeing them in Joanna Lumley: In the Land of the Northern Lights. Witnessing aurora borealis firsthand has been a lifelong ambition of our exquisitely posh host, ever since she first became aware of it from reading a children's book called Ponny the Penguin (a spiritual forebear of Pingu, obviously).



It really isn't spoiling things to reveal that her wish is eventually granted, as programmes like this depend absolutely on the achievement of their goal. I get the feeling that Lumley and her crew would've hung around for months until they'd captured the lights on film – or faked them with CGI, whichever was easier.



It's a very pretty, beguiling film full of stunning Arctic scenery and vivid colours, from red log cabins to multi-hued traditional Norwegian garb (surely the campest in the world), the green-lit interior of an igloo hotel, epic grey-pink skies and, of course, vast expanses of glistening white and pale blue snow.



Narrating throughout as though she's whispering from beneath a cosy bearskin rug, Lumley is a charming, funny host, like a nice minor royal on a cultural exchange visit (without the racist gaffes). Undemanding travelogue telly at its least offensive.



A high-concept drama on an intimate scale, A Number is a more-or-less unadorned adaptation of a Caryl Churchill play. It's a ruminative two-hander starring Tom Wilkinson and Rhys Ifans as a father and sons (Ifans plays three droplets from the same gene pool) struggling to come to terms with the fact that the latter are cloned from a batch of unspecified volume.



This implausible premise just about succeeds thanks to typically strong performance from the leads, and a distinctively stylised script (I'd liken it to Beckett if that weren't such a lazy reference point) that explores the arguments over nature vs nurture and genetic engineering, as well as themes of identity and parental responsibility.



The fractured narrative unfolds via an intense, claustrophobic, deliberately mannered duologue which, while hardly profound, does at least attempt to tackle an interesting debate intelligently.

Channel 4 will surely one day run out of fresh angles from which to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11. After all, how many untold stories can there be? This year, however, they've managed to keep the franchise going with two documentaries exploring avenues that to most of us are probably unfamiliar.



The first, The 9/11 Hotel, tells the story of the luxury Marriott hotel, destroyed when the Twin Towers collapsed. It's a tale of terrible twists of fate and morbid coincidences, principle among them being the account of the man who went for a job interview at the Marriott that morning. After helping a severely burned woman out of the wreckage, he struggled home to celebrate his daughter's birthday, only to discover that his sister and niece had died in one of the hijacked planes.



Unfortunately, such stories are marred by some preposterously melodramatic narration, which insensitively reduces the tragedy to the level of a Towering Inferno-style disaster movie. Take this description of Marriott receptionist and struggling part-time actress, Amy Ting: "She dreamt of fame and fortune on the silver screen, but the events of 9/11 would see her play an important role on a very different stage." You can almost imagine the writer sitting back and patting themselves on the stomach, delighted with their ability to construct such an asinine metaphor.



Such crass insensitivity is, however, nothing compared to that of attention-seeking fantasist Tania Head, who managed to fool the world into believing she had survived the attack. She was eventually exposed as having never even been in New York that day. Why would anyone do such a thing? And how did she get away with it for so long?



Head refused to appear in The 9/11 Faker, but there are plenty of actual survivors on hand to admit that they took her story at face value. After all, no-one would ever be callous enough to exploit such suffering, would they? Astonishing stuff.