Last night on television we had Simon Schama’s History of the Jews, leisurely, quite interesting in a travelogue way, but not very, with Schama a preposterous, pleased-with-himself figure: presentation as the art of waving one’s arms around while looking smug. Schama camps it up and patronises at the same time, firing off one cliché after another, but he was wearing a very nifty fur-collared coat which looked like it was especially bought for the show. Look, here we are in Vienna; now Paris. Vaguely informative but no more than the average coach tour. MoL says take the coach. The Brits can’t get enough of the Nazis: it was Hitler in colour last night on primetime. Apart from the whippet-like Dr G, they were all pretty pudgy; no workout with the Swiss ball for Adolf. The extraordinary thing is how unthreatening they all looked, apart from Röhm who had to be got rid for that reason. It also could be argued that Hugo Boss’s design sense has never been matched since (just to add to the controversy) although Hitler himself too often looked like he could have done with a wardrobe makeover. Last week saw the start of Peaky Blinders, a new gangster drama set in Birmingham after the 1914-18 war (the Brits can’t get enough of the first world war). Peaky Blinders wanted to be Sergio Leone. The filmmakers said it was. The publicity claimed it was. The critics fell into line and passed on that it was. MoL says the problem with BBC drama is however hard it tries not to be Middlemarch, it always ends up exactly like Middlemarch: pudding even when trying to look like Pasolini when it’s failing to look like Leone. The only interesting question raised by the first episode (apart from distinctly unlocal accents) was how direction – as in the application of an individual sensibility to a collective enterprise – seems to have become a thing of the past. Peaky Blinders amounted to less than the sum of its departments and sources and references and quotes and homages, and this and that, and funny haircuts and enough tweed to make a fashion catalogue jealous, leaving an overriding impression of terribly laboured cool. Every scene was covered from all angles, shot to death, and each angle had to be included, leading to huge congestion and a sense of exhaustion. Leone by contrast kept a pretty steady camera. Plus an irritating contemporary soundtrack, irritating because years ago MoL suggesting to the BBC doing Jane Austen with jukeboxes (Mr Knightly grooves on down) and quickly got shown the door.