Realty is bizarre enough to trump TV

While BBC2 wheels out the usual retrospectives – looking back from the present and the future – Channel 4 proves that life is bizarre enough without imagining new realities

Contemporary television is so much in love with quirky packaged retrospectives about programmes from various decades and the history of television genres. The 1970s, for example, have been so analysed to death in television documentaries with standard images of flared trousers, Slade and striking workers, that one critic, Howard Sounes, has written a recent history of that decade as a deliberate attempt to rescue the reality from the imposed clichÎs of television retrospectives. It is virtually impossible for a week to pass without yet another wheel-out of extracts from old comedy sketches, whether packaged openly like Channel 4's recent Fifty Best Comedy Sketches or with more intellectual padding and a sober title like The Story of Light Entertainment (BBC2, Saturday, 9.25pm). They add up to the same thing, a B-list of comedians, writers and producers wrapping a tapestry of soundbites around extracts from Steptoe and Son or Till Death Us Do Part.

Having fully cannibalised its past, this week it was time for television to cannibalise its future with Armando Iannucci's devised Time Trumpet (BBC2, Thursday, 11.20pm). This took the standard clichÎs of retrospective television analysis and ? often with great comic effect ? applied them to a mockumentary look at the television year of 2007 as remembered from the prospective of a programme supposedly made in 2031. Iannucci is a clever television director, but one problem with cleverness is that sometimes it is stunningly audacious and simply comes across as clever for the sake of being clever. Time Trumpet was a bit of both, with actors playing much-aged contemporary figures like David Beckham (who remembers how, in his trend-setting prime, he was the first footballer to have real female genitalia transplanted onto his upper arm) or Charlotte Church (who remembered vomiting up her entire intestines so that they hung outside her body and made her audience vomit at concerts). Occasionally items were wonderful absurd, like a bogus documentary clip about Eastenders where the movement of all the glasses in pub scenes were shot separately and then superimposed into the actors hands for health and safety reasons, or an elderly and forgotten David Cameron explaining how, in his attempts to be popular in 2007, he spent an entire month being black. But sometimes, for such a supposedly futuristic programme, it clung to contemporary Britain's seemingly insatiable fascination with the relationship between Tony Blair (who by 2031 has gone mad and lives among the dustbins in Baghdad) and Gordon Brown. Hopefully by 2031 that particularly tedious spat will be a forgotten footnote.

While the BBC's The Story of Light Entertainment dealt briefly with racial tension in 1970s Britain, through situation comedies like Love Thy Neighbour, The Great British Black Invasion (Channel 4, Saturday, 7.25pm) dealt with the theme head-on in its rather simplistic charting of the various movements that led to an influx of foreign workers into Britain. It started with airmen recruited in the West Indies during the second world war who introduced calypso music into Britain, which in turn led to the arrival of a wave of musicians from Trinidad. This was followed by 4,000 bus workers lured to England from Barbados and they, in turn, were followed by large numbers of midwives recruited from Jamaica.

If society has moved on from 1961, when a boycott needed to be organised before the Bristol Bus Company would employ black drivers, it was interesting that, 40 years later, a glass ceiling meant that many of the Barbadians are still driving buses and few Jamaican midwives are matrons. What was most fascinating, though, was the British government propaganda film shown in Jamaican cinemas to emigrants to Britain. The minister beseeching them to come was Enoch Powell.

That's one problem with reality: it's so bizarre in retrospective that it can trump anything Time Trumpet can throw at us.