The plays of Harold Pinter have often been discussed in terms of what's not said, and so it may be fitting that he fails to give any answers himself in Arena - Harold Pinter (Saturday, 9pm, BBC2), a two-part documentary directed by Nigel Williams.
A career policy of letting his characters speak for him - combined with recent illness - meant that the playwright gave no new interviews for a project with which he otherwise co-operated. Faced with this rather important pause, Williams fills it in various ways.
Footage from a 2001 American symposium shows Pinter gravely declining to explain his plays to students. There are also extracts from the playwright's recordings of a series of autobiographical sketches and - most bizarrely - his biographer Michael Billington plays sections from the taped conversations with Pinter which were the basis for the book. But, because of the gap in sound requirements between biographer's cassettes and broadcast soundtrack, the Billington interviews have to be subtitled on screen.
Another - less successful - visual oddity is Williams's decision to interview the current owners of all the rooms in which Pinter wrote his plays. It's a neat conceit - much of Pinter's work is about the fight for space within a location - but it gives a literary documentary an unwanted undertow of Changing Rooms. It's an example of television's demand for visual material making the fact of where a writer wrote more important than what he wrote.
The programmes are also more concerned with the origins of the plots than the sources of the dialogue, when it's the gift for semi-surreal semi-transcription of daily speech which is the key to Pinter's greatness.
But this is the traditional weakness of arts documentaries, which are happier with narrative than technique.
Although Pinter happily seems to be recovering from illness, it's hard to watch these films without a sadness about other matters. There was a time in the 1960s when original plays by Harold Pinter were shown in ITV peak-time. There was a time in the 70s and 80s when films like this about writers were a regular part of the BBC2 schedule.
Intelligently using clips and comments, these films have everything except the Pinter interview you want. And, given the writer's liking for details which seem very slightly not right, it may also be neat that he's for some reason receiving a 71st birthday tribute from the BBC rather than the dull old round number that other writers get.
While the Pinter films belong to a classic cultural documentary tradition - arty, playful, assuming that the viewer brings a certain interest to the subject - Great Britons (Tuesday and Thursday, 9pm, BBC2) is a newer kind of profile: starting from the belief that the audience knows nothing about the topic and the fear that they may not want to go away knowing too much.
These 10 historical documentaries are the culmination of a national survey to choose the 100 greatest figures from UK history. Although the series will hope to reach at least three million viewers, Radio Times reports that only 30,000 people voted - which perhaps explains the presence alongside the inevitable Shakespeare, Dickens, Churchill, Nelson and the three Royal Elizabeths of such fresh and possibly perishable flavours as David Beckham, Freddie Mercury and John Peel.
The documentaries have the structure of a balloon debate, with a different presenter each week arguing the case for one of the top 10. The original survey functions rather like American primary elections, leading to a final run-off during this series in which viewers elect one of the 10 as Britain's First Person.
This system of advocacy weakens the series as historical teaching because the presenter is required to be relentlessly positive, while the best history admits nuance and argument. A flag-waver for Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Darwin (this week's opening subjects) at least has some use in schools, but some of the other candidates - notably Princess Diana and William Shakespeare - are already so eulogised that the film you want to see is the one about why they should go out of the balloon.
Though clearly post-Schama in inspiration, the series starts off extremely sub-Schama in tone. The advocate for Brunel is Jeremy Clarkson, whose rhetoric is fine for cars but sounds odd when trying to echo the tradition of Schama and AJP Taylor.
Breaking into a sort of middle-age, middle-class rap, Clarkson invites votes for "the king of the hill - the mad, the outrageous Isambard Kingdom Brunel" who built "humungously vast" bridges at a time when "Europe had galleons but we had the Starship Enterprise". Clarkson sounds increasingly like a bad impressionist trying to do Alan Whicker but coming out as Alan Partridge.
Simon Schama and David Starkey made history on television popular, but now Great Britons is trying to make it populist, which is a very different ambition. The presenters are largely non- historians known for other areas of knowledge, and the vote-led nature of the series results in yet more documentaries on figures rarely off our screens such as Shakespeare and Churchill. My guess is it's Diana v Churchill for Number 1, with the former the favourite because her supporters are more likely to be email savvy.
Two Great Britons overlooked from the Top 100 - John Logie Baird and Lord Reith - might have wondered if this is the best we can do with their invention. A more interesting commission might have been Unknown Britons, in which historians make a case for fascinating figures we've overlooked.
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Monday October 28 2002
John Logie Baird was not overlooked in the top 100 of the BBC's Great Britons poll. He is in there, placed alphabetically with his middle name, between David Lloyd George and John Lydon (Johnny Rotten).
