The Unseen Eric Morecambe (C4), Uncle Adolf (ITV1) : Here we go again - programmes making promises they can't keep.

The Unseen Eric Morecambe claimed to reveal new material that "throws dramatic light on everyone's favourite entertainer".

The basis for this was gaining access to Morecambe's private study at his home in Hertfordshire. The room was left untouched for 20 years after the comedian's death. Now the family has opened the door to his den and invited viewers to look around.

Some material was seen for the first time, even by his close family. There were tapes and audio cassettes, on which he offered his private thoughts, home movies offering rare glimpses of the off-screen man and notebooks containing ideas for comic sketches.

Intercut with comments from his widow Joan and children, the programme recounted the Eric Morecambe story of a man driven by professionalism and perfectionism and one who, perhaps, put his career before his health.

But after 90 minutes, despite glimpses of Morecambe at play and confessing his worries on tape that success would end, this revealed little that we didn't know before.

What it did offer was a comprehensive TV biography of one of TV's funniest performers and, with numerous clips from Eric and Ernie's most famous shows, this couldn't be anything but entertaining.

He took his work very seriously and, after the duo's first BBC TV show flopped, was determined never to be humiliated in that way again. You understood his feeling this way after learning that one newspaper defined a TV set as "the box in which Morecambe and Wise died".

With success came responsibility - and a massive coronary at 42 which he was lucky to survive. He also realised that after 29 million viewers watched the 1977 Christmas show, the only way was down.

After another heart attack and by-pass surgery, he took time off for himself. He took up birdwatching, fishing, photography and painting. They were solitary habits in contrast to his work as a comic. He wrote his first book, Mr Lonely.

He didn't need Morecambe and Wise any more, and there was a suggestion that he carried on partly out of loyalty to partner Ernie Wise.

There were also signs he knew time was running out. In the weeks before he died he put photographs in albums, cleared out drawers and visited old friends. Wife Joan was in the audience as he talked about the old times in a charity show. He came out with things she'd never heard before, she said. He was like a man possessed. He collapsed and died backstage at the end of the show.

Uncle Adolf could have been called The Unseen Adolf Hitler as Nigel Williams' script told not of Hitler the war leader but Hitler the... well, either perverted lover or devoted uncle. Take your pick.

The action cut between his final days in the bunker with Eva Braun and earlier times with his half-niece Geli. He was obsessed with the medical student, although she thought he was "a wonderful man but terribly old".

He had her boyfriend beaten half to death and she eventually shot herself. This was an unpleasant tale offering Ken Stott the chance to give a terrifying portrayal of a man in the grip of obsession. And who knows how the course of history would have been changed if she'd responded to his advances.

Published: ??/??/2004