It's a nugget of counterintuitive wisdom that the smartest thing Denis Thatcher ever did was gently and silently to collude in the cartoon character given him by the media. It grew to be the accepted truth that he was a golf-club buffoon in search of a G&T, with his foot in his mouth and a look of incomprehension at the world of politics and pretty much everything that had happened outside of Surrey in the 1950s. It was a useful disguise for Thatcher, who could carry on his real life uninterrupted. Nobody had been the male spouse of a PM before, so it was as good a way as any of inventing a job.
The partners of politicians are a soft target, and it is one of the nasty corollaries of democracy that, though they are not elected and have no power, no staff, no income, no role, no voice, they are endlessly answerable to the rhetorical spleen of commentators and comedians. Mostly, they are simply scorned, like Mary Wilson with her poetry and Norma Major with her petit-bourgeois sensibilities. But with Cherie Blair, the mockery grew truly vicious. She was created as a monstrous figure of national loathing in what became sustained bullying. Even her final, mild exit line about not missing the press much was flung back in her face with gob-flecked baying.
You'd have thought that would have been that. But here, before the spittle has dried on her lapel, Cherie is back on television in her own tell-all reality documentary, The Real Cherie Blair (Wednesday, BBC1).
Like some ridiculously wronged and embarrassed It girl who sells her story to the News of the World "to put the record straight", she isn't selling anything, she's not got a book out, nobody's twisting her arm. She chose to go on TV all on her own. For a clever woman, she's wondrous stupid.
The first rule of bad press is if you want to put out a fire, stop pouring petrol on it. This look at Cherie's life shows her to be brittle, defensive, quick to take offence, unwilling to take blame and utterly, completely, totally bereft of charm. In short, not a particularly attractive or likeable woman. With a huge self-awareness blind spot, she told us she'd never bothered about clothes or make-up or appearance because she was the clever one. Her cleverness may well be voluminous, but it doesn't begin to cover her vain regard for her cleverness.
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There were some bizarre moments, such as the staged meeting with her father. "Has he been embarrassing me?" she asked the camera. Old Father Booth giggled and wriggled, and in that moment you saw their roles had completely reversed. He was the naughty child; she, the long-suffering parent. Even Tony Blair, the great communicator and empathiser, failed to rise to a convincing encomium for her, finally grinding to a wordless, grunting halt. Cherie, for all her charity finger buffets and cleverness, is not a winning or sympathetic character, but failing at niceness doesn't preclude bullying. Victims don't have to be lovable to be victims. Part of her awkward unlovability is down to her life as a victim of one sort or another, although she'd hate to think of herself as one. Any inner-city teacher will tell you about the complex and unmentionable syndrome of children who connive in their own bullying. Cherie Blair's decision to go on TV was a sad and weird act of complicity.
The Thick of It (Sunday and Tuesday, BBC4) returned to lasso the handover of power with the bola of inverted-comma irony, but it wasn't the absence of Blair we noticed in Armando Iannucci's comedy as much as the absence of Chris Langham, who was the original maypole around which the rest of the cast jigged and gambolled. For all its cleverness and insider's observation, this comedy still noticeably lacks a central character around which to revolve. Its three or four ensemble players all seem to be auditioning for the role that will fill the centre of the doughnut. It's essentially The Office without David Brent. The first episode so awed The Guardian that it wrote a leader about it - on a day when the police were arresting suspected terrorists, there was a real-life reshuffle of the shadow cabinet and the pound hit a record high against the dollar. Still, it is clever and funny, although the funny bits are mostly elaborate and violently crude name-calling in a Scottish accent, so it can sound a bit like the best bits from Loaded's 100 Best Political Insults. And I have a tiny cavil: I had no idea who anyone was. Were they all press officers? Some of them must have been MPs, but it was difficult to tell, except for the black ones. I knew the black ones must be cleaners, because this was satire.
I get the uneasy feeling that The Thick of It is a programme that's too cool for school; it's turned its back on the audience, preferring to be cultily enjoyed by political running dogs, media courtiers and journalists. It'll get talked about and awarded but remain essentially unloved and unwatched, rather like the thing it's parodying, and it lacks the common touch. It doesn't hold the ghastly machinations of Westminster up to public ridicule; rather, it tickles them with a mild joshing. This isn't Brechtian comedy so much as end-of-term high jinks.
There was a car advertisement with a French girl who extols Froggy things and an English boy who boasts of Brit stuff. It finishes up with her saying something like: "Paris, the most romantic city in the world", and our boy leering: "Prove it." Anyway, someone liked it so much, they turned it into a series, without the Brit bloke. Most travel shows on telly tend to be of the 19th-century gentleman-adventurer type, about places you're pleased to look at and even more pleased you don't have to spend a fortnight in. But last year there was a good insider's guide to Venice, and now we're being shown Paris(Tuesday, BBC2), which is very annoying, mostly because we're being shown it by a Parisian, and nothing in the whole wide TV world of fact or fiction is as creasingly, colon-scouringly irritating as a French bint with her smug up.
This one has that "I'm smart and sexy simultaneously, n'est-ce pas?" look. The programme is the sort of tourist guide you get on the in-house channel in international hotels: short on interest, long on soothing PR adjectives. With that laughable accordion jazz the French simply won't admit is ghastly, we were shown the revolution's declaration of the rights of man. Our guide told us, with a patronising smile, that this document had changed the world, that the French had invented the age of reason and, with it, human rights for the rest of us. "It makes me feel very proud," she added, with all the vaunting modesty a Parisian can muster. The truth is that the French bill of rights comes 13 years after the American one, which it copies virtually word for word. In fact, Thomas Jefferson was the ambassador to Paris at the time, and he helped them to write it. We were also told the nasty old guillotine was not really French at all but the invention of those barbarous Italians. Next week, Pigalle, birthplace of Martin Luther King, where he wrote his famous " J'ai un rêve" speech; and Montmartre, home of rock'n'roll.