The presenter Michael Wood, pursuing the Bard to Lancashire, takes his first, well-overdue deep breath in the second instalment of In Search of Shakespeare (BBC2, 9.20pm, Saturdays). "It's easy to get carried away looking for Shakespeare, isn't it?" he asks. Well, you should know, old chum. Appropriately, perhaps, for an account of an actor and playwright, Wood's prologue to the opening programme (broadcast the previous week) was the hammiest I've ever seen.
During the opening sequence, Wood, who to his credit has hardly modified his unkempt hairstyle since the days when it was de rigueur, was a figure in perpetual motion, always walking: past Tower Bridge and a misty Canary Wharf, through forests and fields and up a hill, where an urchin asked: "Are you walking all the way there?" You bet he was. Summer turned to autumn. Autumn became snowy winter. Wood strode on, a man for all seasons.
Yet for a few moments, as he took off on his trek, I feared that this over-seasoned traveller, who has pursued Troy, the conquistadors and Alexander the Great to their dens, was losing his nerve. "Can the life of a writer ever be as interesting or as exciting as that of an inventor, a conqueror or an explorer, a Napoleon, a Columbus or an Alexander the Great?" he asked.
"Well, yes," he answered, italics all over the place. "Yes, it can. More so because the writer and the poets are the explorers of the human heart and, long after the conquerors are forgotten, their legacy will be the most valuable to us, and Shakespeare is the greatest writer who ever lived. Who wouldn't want to know what made him tick?" If this is how Wood addresses serious-minded BBC2 viewers on a summer's night, I want to be a fly on a wall when he pitches his next programme to Sky.
There is no question that we are curious about Shakespeare's life. The problem is that most of us accepted long ago that so little is known of it that we are best off reading the plays and the poems and hiring Shakespeare in Love when our attention flags. In terms of historical facts, Wood, however, is doing a good job of persuading us that there is more straw with which to make bricks than we thought. Whenever the producer Rebecca Dobbs can manage it, Wood is shown poring over documents and archives, in fact anything containing a variation of the name Shakespeare. "Elizabethan England was a police state. Its spies recorded everything," insists Wood.
The dark secret of the Shakespeare family, he argued, was that it was Catholic, caught on the wrong side of the sectarian divide when the music stopped, after a dozen years in which England's official faith changed three times. The head of the Bard's mother's family, Edward Arden, was eventually arrested, taken to the Tower of London, where he was tortured on the rack, and executed before the crowds at Smithfield meat market. Meanwhile, the state was also on his father's case. John Shakespeare, Warwickshire farmer-turned-Stratford glovemaker, was finally nabbed for illegal wool-trading. This was a family full of secrets and when William got the older woman Anne Hathaway pregnant, followed by a shotgun wedding, he began, perhaps, to live his own secretive existence. A "soberly attractive woman", Wood concluded, with a double-query in the margins of his voice when he eyed her portrait.
The other problem for Wood and Dobbs is what to do with the actorly side of things. Recruiting the RSC under Gregory Doran to perform relevant scenes in original venues such as the New Inn at Coln, the last remaining theatre pub with an Elizabethan-style gallery, must have seemed a splendidly relevant idea. Unfortunately, the net effect was of a coachload of luvvies showing off on a day out before the usual audience of middle-class provincials. Even this was not as bad as watching Wood pretend to corpse at the precocious antics of the schoolboys of Stratford Grammar performing Ralph Royster Doyster. In fact, all the scenes of modern-day Strat-ford burghers, especially the cocktail party with the ex-mayors, were pretty off-putting.
Against this, there have been some undoubted televisual successes. When Wood climbed up a hill to see the view over Gloucestershire and identified local landmarks that ended up in Richard II, you wondered why anyone ever bothered to doubt that it was the Warwickshire lad who had written the plays. Shakespeare wrote of a man's conscience stretching like a piece of chevril, and Wood went to a Stratford glovemaker to show us exactly what chevril was and to demonstrate its stretchiness. The best moment comes on 5 July, when Wood develops Victorian photographs of a Bishopsgate virtually unchanged since Shakespeare rented rooms there for a penny a night and drank Mad Dog and Left Leg at the Four Swans.
He cannot contain himself at this discovery: "an amazing chance", a "stunning coup". Leave the adjectives to us next time, Mikey. In the meantime, we may wonder if this "historical detective story", this "Elizabethan whodunnit", is going to produce any insights into Shakespeare's work that are more interesting than the suggestion that his secretive life in "schizophrenic" England taught him the trick of seeing - wait for it - "both sides" of every question.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
