Bluestone 42

Well, it’s undeniably a varied week on the box. Mr Selfridge creaks to its conclusion on ITV this Sunday (9pm). It won enough friends to earn a second series but I couldn’t quite take to this retail period drama. Jeremy Piven was agreeable enough. He illuminated even the dimmest recesses of the sumptuous, authentic-looking sets with his bold American teeth. But a number of the characters, particularly the younger ones, seemed indistinguishable. There were too many standard RADAissue Eliza Doolittle voices and too many of the cast had picked a wig out of the dressing-up box marked ‘Princess Anne 1991’.

No one ever quite said, ‘I’m a good girl, I am’ or ‘naff orf’ but for the whole 10-episode run, both phrases seemed to be on the tip of everybody’s tongue.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Bluestone 42 (Tuesday, 10pm on BBC Three). The story of a bomb-disposal squad in Afghanistan, defusing IEDs under enemy fire, didn’t seem the most natural basis for a sitcom. Best summed up as The Hurt Locker meets It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Bluestone 42 centres around a seven-strong team led by Captain Nick Medhurst (Oliver Chris, looking for all the world like a taller Prince William).

There is, as one might imagine from squaddies working in a dry, dusty, and most of all deadly environment, gallows humour in abundance. There is also, I must point out, some quite astronomically bad language. It couldn’t be remotely realistic without at least a moderate amount of swearing. And Bluestone 42 contains a more than moderate amount.

That’s not the difficulty I had with the show, though. I’m not convinced that it’s altogether appropriate to be laughing about a conflict in which people, both Britons and Afghans, are losing their lives daily. Now in its second week, the show is undeniably very funny. At its heart it’s an ensemble workplace comedy in the vein of Dad’s Army or Are You Being Served? And it’s a welcome change to see a sitcom that’s played ‘straight’ after the Office-inspired overdose of mockumentaries.

I like it, while still not being certain that I should. But whatever my opinion on the matter, Bluestone 42 is indubitably an original, inspired premise for a television programme. And we don’t get one of those every day.

Which brings me, tangentially, to the highlight of the week. This week’s Horizon (Thursday, 9pm on BBC Two) is a study of the neuroscience that underpins creativity; why solutions suddenly strike us out of the blue and how creativity differs from intelligence. With a series of engaging public experiments, one of which I must say I felt was rather a cheat, the programmemakers reveal what we can do to encourage inspiration to strike. Science documentaries are all too often processions of husky American chaps mumbling about molecules or galaxies or somesuch. It’s no mean feat to make an abstruse subject as comprehensible, or as watchable, as this is.