Rise of acting genius Dame Helen Mirren

CLOSE TO the start of The Many Faces of Dame Helen Mirren (Saturday, BBC2), a contributor said something very poignant.

In pointing that out I don’t mean to imply that no one said anything else poignant for the duration of the programme.

Actually, the whole thing was full of thoughtful comment and revealing clips.

The contributor’s early point, though, was especially clever because it was more about other actresses than it was about Ms Mirren.

Few of the talented young women forging an acting career in today’s world, he said, could hope to have a CV like Helen Mirren’s.

That comment said as much about the changing world as it did about Helen Mirren’s undoubted talent.

Spanning everything from experimental Sixties films to TV crime dramas, the Royal Shakespeare Company to Hollywood action movies, Mirren’s success has been due not only to her gifts but also to a world that once was more broad-minded, a world that rewarded genius and didn’t only think about the marketing.

The genius of Mirren, of course, was the real subject matter of the programme and this was given a decent treatment by co-actors, directors and cultural historians alike. Strangely, this mixed group came pretty close to agreeing on the nature of Mirren’s unique appeal.

The characters she plays are engaging, addictively watchable at the same time as never being particularly warm or nice.

For a classic example, think of Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series: tough and principled but forever fighting off an inner bleakness.

Audiences like that: a hint of hidden depths or darkness, giving them something to ponder long after the credits have rolled.

We were reminded, too, that Mirren has never shied to reveal more flesh than other actresses of her generation.

She set out her stall, perhaps, in her very first film appearance, a walk-on part in a bikini in a Norman Wisdom film.

Yet in an age when nudity is often used to spice up a scene, people remain favourably disposed when Mirren does it.

Is that because she genuinely only takes her clothes off when it makes dramatic sense (as in the splendid Calendar Girls film) or more because we know she doesn’t have to try to get our attention?

There are no firm answers where the appeal of an actress is concerned but this tribute tried hard to give the matter a grown-up going over and that was infinitely preferable to what it could have been. A clip-montage, interspersed with actors gushing.

The Secret Life of the Sun (Sunday, BBC2) sent presenters Kate Humble and Helen Czerski to all manner of locations, sunny and otherwise, in a quest to explain just what our celestial fireball is and does.

Much of their revelations were down to the astonishing new technology in the hands of the Rutherford Appleton laboratory in Oxfordshire, which is the closest thing Britain has to a Nasa.

Thanks to state-of-the-art satellite imaging, we can now see all sides of the Sun and observe at relatively close range the maelstrom of storms and eruptions that whirl across its surface.

According to some sources, solar activity is leading us into another mini-ice age, like the one that led to the ‘frost fairs’ on the frozen Thames in the 17th century.