At the Royal Festival Hall last Tuesday, during her 40th anniversary tour, every other song stopped the show, none more tumultuously than an interminable arrangement of Foreigner's 'I Want to Know What Love is' so slow and thunderous that Phil Spector would have been proud to own it. But apart from a remarkable gown that artfully exposed her wondrously sculpted back, nothing fitted her better than a piece of continental kitsch called 'Dio, come ti amo', which seemed - like the singer - to have been cryogenically frozen in about 1959. If she needed a redeeming feature, it would be a self-awareness which gently mocks both her worshippers and herself.. COMRADES, colleagues, partners in the viewing project, I give you Malcolm from Bridgwater] The oldest delegate on Labour Party Live (BBC2), he was moving the vote of thanks. It was Malcolm they should have been grateful to: 50 years spreading socialism in Somerset puts him in that great thankless taskforce of history headed by King Canute. Easier to turn the tide than a permanent wave of Tory matrons. With his yarmulka of white hair and shy, bootsward delivery, Malcom had clearly never seen an image consultant.

'I'd like to thank all the craysh - I hope that's right - workers.' They didn't have creches when Malcolm joined the party, they had Clem Attlee shouting on the back of a lorry. 'Those were the days,' said Malcolm, 'not a TV camera in sight and it was lovely.' Evidence of TV's unlovely influence was everywhere Behind, loomed the backdrop, a Niagara of Jeyes fluid. British lavatory green: a fresh colour, a hygienic colour, a colour to expunge all known germs and those stubborn stains And so much more soothing than red in tooth and clause. Turning the Blackpool conference on early, I thought I'd gone mad, but it was only Thunderbirds in French (BBC2).

'Parcoeur?' 'Oui, milady.' A good trailer for the main event, as it turned out: like all party conferences, this one featured a lot of wooden performers speaking a foreign language. Fortunately for Tony Blair most prospective voters were at work and didn't see the rank- and-file dynamiting their way through the 37th composite (rhymes with fight, not wit). The formidable Sheena MacDonald and a ropey Jon Sopel did the linking while delegates droned on as if to prove an ancient law: the more boring the speech, the more reliable the comrade. 'I know you'll want to know the outcome of card vote 3,' said a twinkling Robin Cook, 'If that doesn't keep you here, I don't know what will.' Irony, of course, is illegal under Clause 5, but no one was awake to invoke it. With little drama on the podium, the camera scanned the audience, catching famous faces like Jack Straw rudely chatting through a veteran comrade's speech. If any speaker offered a 'modernist' thought, the director cut to Arthur Scargill. You started looking forward to these moments; remarkable how Our Arthur, peevish under his spun-sugar barnet, is a dead ringer for Queen Victoria glowering in a lace doily.Born out of a desire to make two nations one, the Labour Party is now two nations itself. There is the one that gets on the evening news with its sharp suits and benign soundbites and there is the shaggy creature still baring its teeth at old enemies long classified as friends.

A plucky soul occasionally bursts through the cordon sanitaire: Beverley from Edinburgh complained during a composite on the Scottish parliament that she didn't need any help in representing her constituency. 'Maybe the implication there,' said Sheena, 'is that certain senior party people have been perhaps leaning on her to remit her motion.' You couldn't blame Labour: it was Sheena who chided Robin Cook that the conference 'could have been better managed' What she meant was subdued. Democracy is a mess and so it should be, but TV forces its practitioners to tidy it up, lest they trip over a loose end in front of millions. Clem Attlee's socialism came off the back of a lorry, now it's packaged by Ikea.'This is an opportunity to live in a community that's egalitarian.' No, not New Labour, but Alan Bleasdale Presents: Self Catering (C4).