Television - Peter Hitchens's hatchet job doesn't pull its punches but inadvertently reveals a hero. By Andrew Billen Mandela: beneath the halo (Channel 4) Nelson Mandela: accused #1 (BBC2)

Hollywood would end a Nelson Mandela biopic with his release from Pollsmoor Prison in February 1990. His speech repeated the words that he had uttered at his trial 26 years before: "I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live and see realised but, my Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." The movie would then fade to a caption announcing that in February 1994 he was elected president in the country's first all-race election.

Life, however, has an unfortunate habit of crashing through happy-ever-after end credits. The right-wing polemicist Peter Hitchens, in his mordantly critical reassessment, Mandela: beneath the halo (10 May), argued that Mandela's achievement in becoming the country's first black president should not blind us to how he turned out to be a bad one.

He landed some punches. In particular, it was shocking to learn just what an arms dealer Mandela turned into when faced with doing something about the £24bn national debt run up by his incompetent predecessors. His government sold £2.7m worth of arms to Rwanda, £140,000 to Congo, around £32m to Algeria and £200,000-odd to Indonesia (the test for most of us of murderous irresponsibility). The criticism that he had done so was a little odd coming from a man of the right - aren't the right in favour of free trade in everything? - but telling none the less.

Hitchens then moved on to more natural Tory ground by condemning Mandela for his chumminess with socialist dictators such as Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi. If I had been him, I would have also thrown in the tea parties Mandela gave for his fellow freedom fighters in the IRA, recorded with sentimentality by Gerry Adams in his memoirs last year. His worst legacy, Hitchens went on, was anointing as his successor Thabo Mbeki, who was, so he alleged, closer to the ANC's "Marxist authoritarian spirit", obsessed with race, dour and hypersensitive.

By this stage, with Hitchens fulminating against Mbeki's tragic but absurd refusal to face the facts of the country's Aids epidemic, I felt we were straying somewhat from the subject. It was like blaming JFK for LBJ. And while Hitchens performed a service in pointing out the high levels of poverty and inequality that remain in South Africa, I began to wonder who was being more naive: the western left he castigated for closing its eyes and pretending South Africa had reached its happy ending, or Hitchens for believing (or purporting to believe) that something like "paradise" could be attained in ten years. Isn't the real point that while Mandela, by handing over day-to-day government to his deputy Mbeki, may have inadvertently slowed the rate of progress, by forging himself into a living symbol of truth and reconciliation, he averted civil war and succeeded in keeping the multinationals in his country?

Hitchens was careful not to criticise Mandela's pre-incarceration record. Visiting his cell on Robben Island, he praised Mandela's "special strength of character" for surviving the ordeal. By the late 1980s, as the campaign for Mandela's release gained momentum, Hitchens was working on the Daily Express, his Trotskyite and, indeed, Labour Party years well behind him. Nevertheless, I have no concrete evidence to make me doubt he was even then propping up Fleet Street bars and praising Mandela's "special strength of character" to anyone who would listen.

His fellow rightwingers were not so impressed. When, in 1988, the BBC announced it would broadcast a Wembley Stadium concert marking Mandela's 70th birthday, the Tory MP John Carlisle wrote to the home secretary accusing the BBC of "providing oxygen to a terrorist organisation", and on the day a Daily Mail op-ed piece condemned Mandela as a dangerous terrorist. The right preferred, in Hitchens's own paraphrase, "a pro-western Pretoria to a pro-Kremlin ANC government". From that quarter, Mandela: beneath the halo, while it had its moments, was not much more than you would expect.

Later on Monday, Nelson Mandela: accused #1 pacily told the story of Mandela's arrest and trial with eyewitness accounts, dramatisations and an interview with Mandela. It was guilty of its own sleight of hand by skipping over how many were hurt in the ANC's campaign of sabotage against railways, telephone boxes and power pylons ("there were some casualties nevertheless . . ."), but it left you in no doubt of the young Mandela's essentially peaceable idealism. The white judge's comments in sentencing, that "ambition cannot be excluded as a motive", were spectacularly unconvincing.

Though Hitchens refrained from accusing Mandela of seeking the main chance, the juxtaposition of the programmes did his hatchet job no favours. In the Spectator, he complained: "Since people like me are not usually allowed to present TV programmes at all, I suppose I got the job mainly because nobody else wanted to . . . Only a confirmed heretic, an outcast from the Mother Church of political correctness with nothing to lose, could tackle this task." So Hitchens thinks himself a heroic political outlaw. Unfortunately for him, Accused #1 showed us what a hero really looks like.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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