A Band for Britain and Dispatches: David Cameron Uncovered

A Band for Britain (BBC2) is very much in the mould of The Choir: Unsung Town, wherein a choirmaster brought music to a downtrodden community, but with a brass band. How you think the former compares with the latter depends in part on how you feel about brass bands. If you can take or leave them, you have a lot in common with the residents of the former pit village of Dinnington in South Yorkshire. Leaving the colliery band, in particular, has been popular; it's down to just six members, the majority in their 70s. Although it's been going for over a century, the band could soon cease to exist. One gets the feeling it wouldn't be much mourned. Where The Choir had choirmaster Gareth Malone, A Band for Britain has comedian and presenter Sue Perkins, who does not seem to have any formal musical training – although she did win the reality TV series Maestro, so she can conduct a bit. It was still unclear how her mere presence would help the Dinning- ton Colliery Band. "I have nothing to give them apart from lots of enthusiasm and a real love of music," she said. It didn't look as if enthusiasm would be enough. They needed a cornet player. Her strategy is familiar to anyone who's seen The Choir. She leafletted a forlorn shopping precinct and harassed passersby with a megaphone. New members were recruited. Lapsed ones were pressed into returning. The two senior members, Joan and Kay, were obliged to check their pessimism at the door. Britain's best brass-band conductor was drafted in to train them, at which point Sue Perkins disappeared for a bit. She returned in time to conduct their triumphant first performance at the local working men's club. Like Malone, Sue Perkins is likable and virtually unembarrassable, both of which are important when you're trying to persuade strangers to do things. She even looks a bit like him. But she's a TV presenter, not a real musician. Her enthusiasm is televisual, and her presence represents not the power of music to change lives, but the power of telly to make people do things they would not otherwise do. One lad who had quit the band and now sought to come back admitted he just wanted to be on telly, and was he the only one? The brilliant dreadlocked drummer they found on a Sheffield street, for example – did he really long to join a colliery band? I realise that questioning the authenticity of reality television is essentially a category mistake, and if the lure of mild celebrity saves this brass band and the many more like it, that's no bad thing. I don't mind TV being manipulative, as long I'm sufficiently manipulated, but A Band for Britain lacked the tension this formula requires; you always knew everything would be fine. I'll probably still tune in next week, though, because the trailer promised lots of arguments and ill-discipline, and I never learn. The bit of Dispatches: Cameron Uncovered (Channel 4) that made the news was where Ed Vaizey, Tory arts spokesman, suggested Samantha Cameron might have voted for Blair, forcing her to issue a denial. "I could get into a lot of trouble for saying this," said Vaizey, as if he wanted to see exactly how much. "She might have voted for Blair. She might not have voted at all, and she'd be going to the polls in 2010 thinking 'Is Cameron the real deal or should I stick with Brown?'" Call me charitable, but I presumed he meant to preface all that with the words, "Had she never met and married David Cameron". Consequently I didn't even make a note of it when I watched it the first time, although I did write down something else Vaizey said: "Until you've got the chicken in place who understands the modernising agenda, you're not going to lay the modernising egg." We'll just have to see which statement posterity honours more. Andrew Rawnsley's film was a sturdy and thoughtful examination of David Cameron, his party and his policies, although I didn't think Cameron was quite uncovered by it. The star turn was Peter Mandelson, whose waspishness is terribly beguiling as long as he's on the attack. Most of the politicians interviewed, even Cameron himself, struggled to define "Cameronism", but Mandelson didn't even pause. "Cameronism is a reversion to the cardinal principle of Tory party politics," he said, "which is that their duty is to be elected." I wrote down everything he said.