David Hockney, bundled against the cold, paints the Yorkshire landscape as if his life depended on it, a finished canvas a day. Bradford born, he has come back to the land of his birth to find new springs for his art. He has been in Los Angeles 30 years – “all gay people like Hollywood; people wear fewer clothes, take care of their bodies” – but in this affectionate portrait (Imagine, BBC1 Tuesday) he’s more of an old Yorkshire lad than a gay one, and the stonewalls are on the moors.

The paintings are slabs of colour, but with a grander purpose than homage to his native heaths. Hockney wants to poke western art in the eye with a stick. Since the 15th century, he says, the artist has always been there as a point of view. Studying Chinese drawings, he sees landscapes roll along the scrolls as though they had painted themselves. “Do we know,” he asks, with a little self-deprecating grin, as if unable to rid himself of the irony that he should be so pretentious, “what an empty room looks like?” And so this man, whose portraits and boys’ bodies have for decades stared out at the world is now urgently seeking his own absence. You cannot see him finding it – but the results are worth the quest.

No doubt about the point of view in The World According to Burns (BBC Parliament Saturday): it was that of the novelist Andrew O’Hagan, and it mostly served the bard well. His sympathetic contemplation on the poetry included the perfect little poem “Tae a Moose”, where the nest turned over by the plough and the frenzied panic of the mouse – “wee sleekit cow’rin’ tim’rous beastie!” – leads to the extraordinarily modern thought that “I’m truly sorry man’s dominion/ Has broken nature’s social union” – a pantheistic-cum-communitarian sentiment well ahead of Wordsworth and Shelley. Burns also gave us the direct, erotic warmth of the love poems; the joyous guying of hypocrisy in “Holy Willie’s Prayer”; the narrative drive of “Tam O’Shanter”; and the egalitarian radicalism evident everywhere, especially in the famous “A man’s a man, for a’ that” – with the defiant “The rank is but the guinea stamp/The man’s the gowd [gold], for a’ that!”, flung out, daring some lordling’s wrath. Possessed of all the sins, a man of the peasantry, he died in poverty at 37, and has been a literary celebrity since – sentimentalised, misquoted and tortured at a hundred thousand Burns suppers.

The false note is when O’Hagan seeks to make of the literary hero an ideal man. He broods on the fact that Burns thought of shipping off to Jamaica to become, literally, a slave driver. But this was not the only blot. Burns was a man whose “love of the lassies”, which O’Hagan celebrates, resulted in illegitimate births which he could not support; if the Presbyterian disapproval he mocked was dourly unattractive, its point was more humane than his own careless seeding. Vain and exploitative, generous and intellectually precocious, he was great in his art: in that, not in his life, lay a transcendence of the 18th-century human limits.

Absent from Bernie Madoff’s life seems to have been any human sympathy whatever. His victims cheered when, early this past week, he was given 150 years for the biggest fraud in world history: rightly, since this man had swindled thousands, reducing some to poverty. Yet The Madoff Hustle (BBC2 Sunday) did not shock and awe as much as it should have. It may have been the commentary by Robert Vaughn, the timbre mocking and ironic; it may have been that most of the victims interviewed looked as if they were still getting by nicely enough. As moving a moment as any was the Jewish banker who said Madoff had brought shame on the community – as well as robbing blind a swathe of Jewish charities, including the Holocaust fund set up by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate. Madoff has said all of the scam was done by him, and no one else was involved; as one hedge fund manager attested, this was hardly possible, given that his wife, brother and sons all had senior positions in his outfit, and his investors were regularly sent out a pack of lies about their investments. The case has yet to unwind.

Three hearty young Englishmen have set off to race to the South Pole, competing against five other teams. Their frigid odyssey (On Thin Ice, BBC2 Sunday) is a testimony to their guts, but you can hear them saying, “God, it’s so COLD!” once too often. It did show, however, that urine does not turn to ice before it hits the ground at 30 degrees below, as someone once assured me it did.

And U R S0 V4IN (C4 Friday) was a curious but watchable little number, in which a director-narrator called Ellena Woods, with an insistent voice, said she just had to discover why a man called Nigel who had a number plate which read N2GEL was desperate to get a plate which read N1GEL – and how, having found the man who did have it, and had a Lamborghini to stick it on, seemed to feel more inadequate than ever. Could his sad fixation have been addressed had he said “A man’s a man, for a’ that” to himself as he tooled home in his mere Mercedes? It seemed not.

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