Smallscreen

Telly folk love "pegs": topical justifications for programmes they were going to make anyway. In the case of the US elections we have had not so much a peg as a huge and over-burdened hook. Take any piece to camera this season by Simon Schama, Stephen Fry, Jon Snow, Justin Webb or Michael Crick, and scrutinise the background. British commentators are so thick on Yankee ground that you should be able to spot them tramping through each other's shots, a bit like all those Alan Whickers in that Monty Python sketch.

I won't be reviewing Stephen Fry in America (BBC1). A little of this national treasure goes a long way, and with Kingdom (ITV) and QI (BBC2), he is not so much over-exposed as criminally omnipresent. Let me, then, turn briefly to Simon Schama (The American Future, BBC2). Schama, the master storyteller and author of crackling prose, has been distinctly off-form thus far in his new series. It launched in mid-October, as the world's financial institutions were in meltdown, and used the presidential hustings as its overt peg. And what did he serve up for the first programme? A rather worthy treatise about the husbanding of water in the midwest—a half-hour spread thinly across a wearisome hour of television. You could see the panic the producers got into before transmission: they'd hurriedly spliced quotes from the two candidates for the White House into the pre-title sequence. McCain: "Americans are hurting." Obama: "This is the worst financial crisis since the great depression." But none of this had anything to do with what followed. By the time Lehman Brothers had collapsed and AIG had been nationalised, even the second programme, about Iraq and other American wars stretching back to the civil war, seemed irrelevant. I was yelling at the screen, together with Bill Clinton, "It's the economy, stupid." Those who live by the peg, die by the peg.

By contrast, the drama series on More4, John Adams, has been packed full of insights about US politics (Photo: Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson in More4's John Adams). History does, indeed, repeat itself and both the tragedy and the farce are to be found in this HBO series about America's second president. It's hidden away on Saturday afternoons, and I highly recommend it as an antidote to football results and monochrome movies. Its British director, Tom Hooper, has achieved an extraordinarily earthy, naturalistic style with candlelit interiors and handheld cameras. When John Adams stays in the Netherlands, attempting to win financial support for the revolution from the wily Dutch burghers, the lighting is worthy of Vermeer. Many of the intimate exchanges between Adams and his wife are in extreme close-up where every (apparently unmade-up) spot and blemish is on show. There's a breathtakingly brutal scene where a British exciseman is stripped naked on a Boston quay before being tarred and feathered. In episode three, the Adams family opt for an early version of inoculation against the plague. We get close-ups of a physician's scalpel removing discharge from the purulent sores of a dying plague victim, then inserting it into razor cuts on the children's arms. And when Adams's ship to Europe is involved in a naval battle with the British, the amputation of a sailor's leg—hacksaw through bone—is excruciatingly detailed. It is a graphic picture of how brutish life could be in the late 18th century.

Only at the French court does the mood relent. Adams and Benjamin Franklin are at Versailles to solicit Louis XVI's support. These louche scenes, with ageing courtesans, costumed dogs and face-painted nobles make it look as though Hooper has been temporarily replaced by Fellini.

In the week when US treasury secretary Hank Paulson was haggling with Congress over his $700bn bailout, we saw that self-same Congress in its infancy in the 1770s, delaying and plotting over whether independence should be declared. Jefferson's magnificent declaration is read out in its entirety. Originally he offers, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable," but Franklin says it "smacks of the pulpit" and suggests "self-evident." Adams, marvelling at it all, observes: "Altogether unexpected, a declaration of the rights of all men." Later, in cabinet with the new President Washington, Jefferson remarks, "I'm a little uncertain as to the future of the treasury department… I fear our revolution will be in vain if a Virginia farmer is to be held in hock to a New York stockjobber who in turn is in hock to a London banker." A text for our times, indeed.

Even more appropriate is the actual vote in Congress on the declaration. South Carolina's delegate will not support it until he has an assurance that slavery on the southern plantations will not be raised as an issue. Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, we knew that the only thing that stood between Barack Obama and victory was the colour of his skin. And while his national result was in the end a resounding victory of 53 to 46 per cent over McCain, the story in South Carolina remained very different. There, McCain beat Obama by a thumping 54 to 45 per cent. America's history lies just beneath the surface of its present-day politics.

The cast of John Adams is strong, with Paul Giamatti playing Adams as irascible, egomaniacal, yet honest and sympathetic. Tom Wilkinson offers an enjoyably pantomime portrayal of Benjamin Franklin, with Stephen Dillane as an icy, brilliant Jefferson. The only weak link is David Morse's George Washington. He is as wooden as the great man's celebrated false teeth. But then, apparently, Washington was a truly dull fellow.