Television - Andrew Billen finds ITV's news coverage is regaining much of its lost credibility

Deadlines mock journalists, but I write this on what at least feels like the worst day of the war. It is Sunday night. Baghdad is in flames again, but Iraqi resistance has proved fierce. British helicopters are falling out of the sky through our error. Two RAF airmen have been shot down by US Patriots. American servicemen are paraded as POWs on Iraqi TV. Tomorrow morning, we shall wake up to discover Saddam alive and speaking. On such nights, the CBS anchorman Dan Rather used to end bulletins with the single word: "Courage." After a bad loss in the Falklands, Alastair Burnet ended a News at Ten with a little homily to the effect that wars were won by courage, "the courage of plain people".

But there was nothing chipper about ITV's news bulletins on Sunday, for they recorded that one of their best and longest-serving reporters had been killed on the road to Baghdad, reportedly by fire from the coalition forces. It will be of little comfort to Terry Lloyd's family, but it can be said that the channel he was reporting for has regained much of its lost credibility as a news source since the war began. ITV's News at Ten is an impoverished, irregular ghost of what it once was. But ITV has poured £5.5m of extra resources into covering this war - it may need more before the week's end - and cleared airtime, too. It is also to the credit of its much-criticised factual controller, Steve Anderson, that he has moved the main bulletin to 9pm and allowed it to run for as long as it needs.

ITN has met the challenge with programmes sharper than BBC1's, utilising Sir Trevor McDonald's gravitas by having him anchor in Kuwait (although all he does there, actually, is read scripts), while letting John Suchet exploit the potential for analysis of its London news set. When the war is over, ITV should reward ITN, and honour Terry Lloyd, by making ITV's News at Nine an institution. I cannot see it will do any more harm to the ratings than News at When?

The BBC does not need to find authority, merely its tone, but it too showed an excellent sense of perspective in Panorama (BBC1, 23 March) on Blair's war, which reminded us just how far out on a limb Tony has taken us. Much of Vivien White's report recapped the tidal shift in defence policy from deterrence to pre-emption, the breadth of British opposition and the damage it may cause relations with Muslim countries and citizens. What else it strongly suggested, however, was that the war was also raging as a psychodrama inside the Prime Minister's head.

Ken Clarke feared that Blair's moral vision of a battle against evil would not be recognised in Washington, while Jack Straw spoke of the PM "thriving" in the kitchen heat lesser men would have got out of. "Among other things, you find out about yourself," Straw said, alerting us to the possibility that Blair may emerge even more certain and self-righteous. The Thatcherising of Blair cannot have been a message that the government was hoping to see go out on a difficult Sunday night. Well done, BBC1 for airing it and actually transmitting Panorama an hour earlier than usual. Its courage recalled a similar Panorama about opposition to the Falklands task force 20 years ago.

At the end, BBC1 ran a trailer for The Other Boleyn Girl, which reminded me: I had planned to write about it. In normal times, Philippa Lowthorpe's drama would have been worth devoting a column to. Most of us know Anne Boleyn's story. I did not know, however, that in desperation, she conceived a child by sleeping with her own brother (did she?) or that her sister Mary, the other Boleyn, bore Henry VIII the live son he craved.

By making Mary the titular centre of the story, Lowthorpe and Philippa Gregory, who wrote the book on which it was based, emphasised the moral choices available even to these bossed-around women. Mary kept her virtue even after she fell in love with Henry. But Anne ruthlessly set her cap and bosom at the king from the start. With Anne dying headless and Mary living on in marital harmony with a rich farmer, the curiously contemporary moral of the story was that "life as a nobody" beats life as a celebrity every time.

Refreshingly, it did not look anything like a BBC period drama. The sets were tatty. The atmosphere was claustrophobic. It was filmed with much hand-held camerawork, degraded film stock and the occasional flourish of jump cuts and trees being speeded up in the wind. When Anne ran into the forest, it looked like a scene from The Blair Witch Project. As with that film, this drama's originality drew attention to itself a little too much.

Despite convincing performances from Jodhi May as Anne and Natascha McElhone as Mary, and the back-up of two faithful old actors, John Woodvine and Jack Shepherd, there was some- thing studenty about the project, which intrigued but also irritated.

It will be shown on BBC2 on Friday 28 March at 9pm, war permitting.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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