Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

BBC2, 9.00pm

Travels with my Unfit Mother

BBC1, 9.00pm

In the days before gentrification and wine bars, the port of Leith appears to have amounted to a large shed. This may be historically accurate, but I doubt it. The place also seems to have been located many miles further away from the capital than it is today. Perhaps coastal erosion has been at work but, again, I wouldn't bank on it.

The thing that was eroded by Gunpowder, Treason and Plot was our credulity. Jimmy McGovern and Gillies MacKinnon planted their melodrama on the shifting sands of history, but it was the viewer who was left with a sinking feeling. Here, you thought, we go again: French Mary and the big, bad nobles, history cut and pasted to suit, and of men in tights.

Every writer is entitled to a bad day at the office. With Gunpowder, etc, McGovern seems to have taken six months off, far from his normal territory - Cracker, Hillsborough and the rest - lost in a costume drama theme park. Watching the opening scenes, you found yourself asking odd questions. Can a script be both limp and stiff simultaneously? Is it exposition or ineptitude to have Clemence Poesy (Mary) kick things off with a line such as ''I will return home, for I am now Mary, Queen

of Scots''?

Then, inevitably, there was the history. First, Mary explained that her mother, Mary of Guise, had sent her willingly as a five-year-old to the safety of France. The next thing you knew, there was a flashback appearing to show that the child had been kidnapped.

As ever, John Knox was played by a Pastor Jack Glass impersonator miraculously granted a place on Mary's privy council. Most historians would dispute the depiction of his character; all of them would tell you that he was never part of the queen's inner circle. The fiction raised an obvious question: what's the point of altering the facts when the truth, as any decent biography will attest, was sensationally dramatic?

Lapses into deliberately anachronistic writing were equally irritating. When the suitors began to turn up, one of Mary's ladies vouched for the merits of Darnley: ''He's not a hunchback like the Austrian, or a lady-boy like the Spaniard.'' Lady-boy? You might not have expected broad Scots with a dash of French, but that sort of stuff was plain silly.

Romania, standing in for Scotland, looked nice, nevertheless. MacKinnon has used his budget well and shot the thing intelligently. Poesy, a Parisienne, suited the part and Daniela Nardini stood out as the matriarch of the Catholic Huntly tribe, even when stuck with lines designed to reduce history to its basics for the casual, or English, viewer. ''Aye!'' she thundered, ''a Catholic queen rules a band of Protestant heathens.'' Jings, so that's what it was all about.

Quite what Travels with My Unfit Mother was supposed to be about was none too clear. We know that one of the pleasures of fame is being paid just for living, holidays included, but quite why the BBC was paying Anne Robinson for an extended bonding session with her daughter, Emma, was a mystery.

The latter was taken from Robinson's care in the 1970s, when her marriage broke down and alcoholism overwhelmed her. Ever since, she said last night, she has been making up for lost time. If the film was to be believed, mother and daughter do this by driving each other nuts.

Or rather, in this case, by driving to the American South to drive one another completely nuts. They took a road trip in a big old convertible while mother grumbled, daughter bitched, and Robinson went on - and on - about ''cheap hotels and grotty diners''.

Given that this is a woman who travels with her own silk sheets in case of emergencies, it was difficult to sympathise. For Emma, the trip would be forever remembered as ''Driving Miss Crazy''. ''I love her,'' she concluded of the dragon in the passenger seat, ''but at a distance. Preferably 3000 miles.'' Quite.