The second part of this documentary about fantasy and, like the first, it's interesting and frustrating all at the same time. This episode focused on Tolkien and Peake, which puts it on shaky ground to start with -- a fair enough subject in itself, but too narrow when your series has only three hours to cover the whole of fantasy fiction. And so, the impression given was that fantasy was purely kids' stuff, until Tolkien came along and wrote The Lord of the Rings -- which is too simplistic. I wouldn't mind if it just sketched out the details, but the programme didn't even hint at a more complex picture.

And there were more of the same irritating quirks that the first part had: an uneven selection of talking heads (including, bizarrely, Diana Wynne Jones, who wasn't even mentioned in the episode about the child hero in fantasy); too little in the way of alternative arguments (for example, there was the usual stuff about Middle-Earth being intended as an industrial/wartime allegory; several times, it seemed as though someone was about to argue something different, but the editing made it impossible to know); the distracting voice-over (to be fair, this is probably just me: apparently it's Joe McGann, but it keeps reminding me of Peter Purves). Damien G. Walter also suggested (when talking about the first episode) that 'it's difficult to escape the suspicion that the editorial direction was formed around whatever royalty-free clips the Beeb happened to have in its vaults'; I must admit that the thought did cross my mind, just for a moment, that this programe looked at Gormenghast because there was a BBC adaptation of it a few years ago (I wonder if there'll be clips of Neverwhere in the final episode, about fantasy over the last ten years..?).

But, for all the criticism i'm levelling at it, I did actually learn something from the programme, because I didn't know all that much about Mervyn Peake. All in all, this was a decent basic introduction to its subject matter; the trouble is, it really belongs in a longer series.