The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 527

Saturday September 14 2002 The Editor 13 A Jewish tale excites the critics The autumn TV wars PHOTOGRAPH' EAMMONN MCCABE Zadie Smith: The Autograph Man These are desperate times for ITV, you say with a sigh before quickly adding that I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here was "the best gift a TV executive could receive: an audience of nine million" (Guardian). ITVs coffers have shrunk, 'largely thanks to the collapse of ITV Digital and a slump in advertising sales" (Dally Mall), while the higher licence fee means the BBC can spend more. But, you suggest, fingers flicking idly over the remote, the people's channel could make a comeback. It's worth a punt that Popstars: The Rivals will "mirror the success of Pop Idol and will compete against the BBC's Fame Academy" (Times). But TV is as much about politics as programmes at the moment, you say, having read the Guardian, where the outgoing ITV programming chief, David Liddiment, took a pop at BBC director general Greg Dyke.

And you saw in the Independent that Dawn Airey, the chief executive of Channel 5, had called ITV However, you whisper, "the media village is awash with gossip that Airey is being lined up to become chief executive of a combined ITV." But, you yawn, settling into your sofa, there's a lot of telly to watch before you car. comment on who deserves the ratings. Matt Keating You will have noticed that the dark autumnal clouds of a TV ratings war loom as the BBC and ITV roll out their multi-million-pound costume dramas. When choosing between BBCl's adaptation of George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda and ITVl's 7m remake of Dr Zhivago, you chose the latter, which "undoubtedly has a higher public profile because of the classic and fondly-remembered 1965 film starring Julie Christie and Omar Sharif" (Independent). Ah, you say knowingly, looking up from the Sunday Times, both those televisual superguns were created by Andrew Davies, the man behind the forthcoming Tipping the Velvet the "most sexually explicit period drama" ever made for British TV.

Inform your friends that ITV has been pleading with its rival for a scheduling truce, concerned that poor Zhivago will not get the attention he deserves, if aired at the same time as Deronda. (Independent) You furrow your brow, and whine along with the former Channel 5 boss, David Elstein: "Why should we have a costume concordat for three nights of the year in the interests of viewers', when we could not manage a 10 o'clock treaty to avoid news bulletins clashing three nights every week?" (Times) iBBHHBBBBHBBaLf BBBBMNflSBKBHBflli HBHjiHlHR''' HSbHHbbHbH jHBBmHBMHoBBBBBKki-' jHHHB BSBBHnBBBBBBBBBBHfllBBBBBBBBY' jBBBBBHbhBBBBBHBBh ''bbbhbbBB chase, no fights last so long that in real life both participants would be dead from exhaustion, no buildings blow up in slow motion from a number of different angles." Theatre 7.8 Martin Amis: Kbba the Dread 2.7 It's been hard to avoid Zadie Smith and Martin Amis in the UK press recently. But the column inches have not been composed solely of reviews. Smith has been pilloried in the feature pages for being neither as nice nor as working class as she should be, while Amis's book on Stalin has triggered howls of protest from ageing Trotskyists in the letters pages. What has got lost amid the mud-slinging, though, is whether their books are any good.

Judaism is central to Smith's follow-up to White Teeth. Her hero, Alex-Li, is a Chinese Jew, and her major characters are Jewish. "Jew-ishness," said the Observer, "works beautifully in the novel as a source of ideas and symbols." The Autograph Man, though, also wrestles with ideas of celebrity: Alex-Ii is a dealer in autographs. The book's plot, meanwhile, is driven by the hero's obsession with a retired and reclusive Hollywood star, Kitty Alexander. Critics were as one in praising the book.

The Independent on Sunday was impressed, assessing it as "so much richer than White Teeth; in form and structure so much more complex and The London Evening Standard thought it "a pleasure from the first page to the last All the characters are larger than life The prose, too, is spacious, demonstrative and full of wonderfully apt and funny In Koba the Dread (Koba was a nickname of Stalin), Amis has two concerns: to indict the Soviet leader for the Terror that killed 20 million of his people; and to question how his father, Kingsley, could stay with the Communist party for 15 years and his friend Christopher Hitchens could admire Trotsky. The reviews were scathing. The Mall on Sunday railed at Amis's inappropriate stylistic tics and grandstanding language. "Why should we look at Martin Amis to provide us with a clever-dick word for mass-murder?" it asked. "Amis seems to hope that by transforming Stalin's atrocities into freshly minted language, he can reinvigorate our disgust at them.

In fact, these words just get in the way, blocking off reality with vulgar display, like conjuring tricks at a funeral." The Times changed the point of attack and accused Amis of writing bad history. "In Amis's black melodrama Stalin obliterates everyone and everything The result is a fatal simplification Instead of taking account of a complex society, Koba the Dread turns its decades-long historical tragedy into something merely grotesque and aberrant." The Observer objected to the book's narcissism, such as the passage claiming "the night-time tears of his baby daughter are reminiscent of the screams emanating from the The paper felt it is time for Amis, after writing on Aids, the bomb, the Holocaust, September 11 and Stalin, "to return to what he does best writing comic Film Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, 15 The Bourne Identity, 12 5.8 In a low-key week for films, the only significant releases were the third part of Shane Meadows's Nottingham trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, and an adaptation of a Robert Ludlum spy thriller, The Bourne Identity. Meadows's latest a comic take on the spaghetti western is a more polished effort than either Twenty-FourSeven or A Room for Romeo Brass, with established Brit actors (including Rhys Ifans and Shirley Henderson) employed in place of the director's usual first-time actors. But most reviewers thought his upmarket move had misfired. "The cast list is like a Who's Who of British social realism," said the Daily Telegraph.

"Talented as they are, they seem to have been cast solely for their name-recognition value. Their accents are all over the place." In fact, the Guardian was one of the film's few fans: "It's a mainstream comedy with a lot of laughs and easily the equal of overpraised British milestones like Billy Elliot and The Full Monty." Reviews of the The Bourne Identity, in which Matt Damon plays an amnesiac spy, were more positive. It's a "cool, slick, totally believable spy raved the Dally Mirror, which was relieved that "no cars smash into fruit stalls during the car have. Affair. An," I.

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I Kazumi. Meet After soon. "Let's Damsels in Distress 8 Last month critics had to sit through Tom Stoppard's gruelling three-part The Coast of Utopia; now Alan Ayck-bourn has written his first trilogy since 1973's The Norman Conquests Damsels in Distress. Fortunately, felt the Daily Telegraph, it provides "far greater entertainment value" for the audience at the Duchess Theatre in London. Though they are all set in the same London Docklands flat and acted by the same cast, each of the plays GamePlan, FlatSpin and RolePlay are self-contained.

The common thread is that in all three, as the title suggests, there is a damsel in distress. The Daily Telegraph picked out GamePlan, in which a 16-year-old tries prostitution to escape poverty, as "one of the most powerful, and uncomfortable, plays in the Ayck-bourn oeuvre the writing is at once near-the-knuckle, touching and outrageously The Guardian plumped for the piece about a disastrous dinner party, RolePlay, which it said was Vintage Praising the writer's Scarborough company, the newspaper added: "Ayckbourn, aside from being a matchless comic observer, is also a great director of actors." Matthew Bell All ratings are averages out of 1 0, based on reviews in the UK national press.