Speaking on the Today programme soon after his election to the European parliament, Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, gave as an instance of multicultural absurdity the use of the black actor David Harewood to play Friar Tuck in Robin Hood (BBC1 Saturday). Though I disagree with Griffin on much, I could see, as I watched Hood unfold over the past three months, that he had hit a shrewd nerve: it was a bit of a surprise, in the first episode, to see a black Tuck.

After all, this was, as the script reminded us constantly, about England and its “olde”, true, quintessential values. The chances of an African being part of an outlaw gang operating in the medieval Midlands must have been close to nil. Still, unless you are of Griffin’s view of society, you soon gathered what was happening and could take some satisfaction from its conventional good-heartedness. For this is a New Labour (and New Tory) inclusive Olde England, in which Tuck is black and noble, Big John is Scottish and bad-tempered and the Sheriff of Nottingham is, at least temporarily, a scheming woman. To object that the plots make previous Hollywood versions of the myth look like The Wire (BBC2 Monday-Wednesday) is to miss the point, which is that this is pitched in a kind of never-never-was-land, in which the evil sheriff’s aides say things like, “We had a situation”, and the sheriff snarls back, “Just do it!” Is that better than “Gadzooks!”? I look to Griffin’s next interview on the matter.

Robin Hood wraps up this evening and it would be churlish to reveal the ending. But it’s irresistible to point out its root difference from The Wire, which began its third series on BBC2 this week – the series set against the harsh, corrupt, self-sacrificing world of Baltimore city hall. The well-attested greatness of the series lies in the recognition on the part of the show’s creators and directors of the need to portray psychological complexity. The stage director Declan Donnellan, in his book, The Actor and the Target, writes: “It helps the actor to imagine that the cynic and the idealist are the same person, the saint and the sinner ... the angel and the devil.”

It helps the viewer too. For we have become more sophisticated in our tastes. The Wire, as its detractors point out, is not very popular and was not in the US when it first aired. Its success has been a highbrow, almost literary one but that it was made at all indicates that at least the programme-makers have high ambitions for the viewers, even if the bulk of these have still to catch up. Robin Hood’s tediousness lay in the invariable goodness of Robin and the gang, the unremitting evil of the sheriff and his acolytes. To be sure, there are some hints of a trendy agenda lurking behind the simplicities – the sheriff (male at first, before being supplanted by the deadlier female) referred to his guards as “homeland security” in an early episode – but, broadly, it’s in the cardboard business.

Much the same can be said of Hotel Babylon (BBC1 Friday). This (the fourth) series is set in a luxury hotel. In the first episode, the concierge – the dramatic and moral centre – saves a rich Indian girl from the clutches of a narcissistic, gold-digging Bollywood star whom her father has chosen as her husband. In the second, a TV celebrity couple who sell family values are, in reality, on the verge of a screaming divorce. Mills & Boon, to be sure, but with a small injection of Declan Donnellan: some of the characters reveal themselves as a little complex, devils with a dash of the angelic or vice versa, and some of the plot twists surprise.

The best programme last week was China’s Capitalist Revolution (BBC2 Saturday). It was a hugely well-crafted piece of vivid narration on the end of Maoism and the unique revolution unleashed by Deng Xiaoping, who stimulated a 19th-century British kind of raw capitalism to grow within the still steady grip of the Chinese Communist party. Deng was angel and devil. He was a man of humbler origins than most of his fellow communist hierarchs who grasped that peasants needed freedom to produce, barter and grow. Yet he was also the most iron of fists behind the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square protesters 20 years ago. The programme was vivid because it sought out witnesses who had been there, done the business, seen the action. Most of them spoke in Chinese and (to these ears) the near-shouting emphasis of the speech gave an extra dramatic element, while the subtitles pointed to our growing sophistication as viewers.

To see such programmes is to continue one’s education – the best excuse for the demands that this, the most satisfying kind of television, makes upon us.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd