Kipling's guilt at sending his son to war is touchingly retold by David Haig My Boy Jack ITV1

Whenever Rudyard Kipling's family or friends asked him for a story, his eyes would twinkle and he'd unravel another tale of rich, magic-carpeted imperial life as though he lived permanently in the realm of fantasy. It's possible that he did. David Haig's television play (11 November, 9pm) about the author's relationship with his army officer son, John, who died on his first day of action in the First World War, portrayed a father intoxicated by Empire and a sense of Right and Good out of all proportion to human capability.

Haig, the star as well as the writer, portrayed Kipling from the first scene as a pompous, irrepressible patriarch, who treated his family like loveable imbeciles and the rest of the king's subjects, the world over, in much the same way. If he wasn't scolding or proselytising, he was sailing through life on a warm cloud of benign authority. The only threat to Britannia - in his mind, the brave mother of the Empire with a duty to stay strong for her children - was the Hun, with his natural inclination to pillage and destroy.

Kipling brought up his son with a combination of rugged criticism and expectant, though not conditional, love, to defend the natural order of things. He wanted to be able to admire John as much as to father him; to lead John so that eventually he, Kipling, could relax and be led, safe in the knowledge that he had passed on the baton. But John was less than rigid in his view of duty and, without glasses, as good as blind.

Nevertheless, he was eager to join the forces defending Britain and her Empire from the Germans. John was a product both of his time and of his father's ceaseless patriotism. He wanted to escape his family's stifling bosom, contained at Bateman's, their vast Sussex homestead, and to make his own life, which joining the navy would facilitate. Pragmatism was a word unknown to Kipling, for whom the only acceptable rite of passage was to fight for king and country.

Kipling, who counted George V as his friend, shoe-horned his son into the Irish Guards, despite John failing every eye test there was. Hardly noble or proper, but in his view the only right thing to do. John struggled from the outset with target practice - his glasses would slip down his nose as he aimed - but progressed to lead his own platoon. He died, along with most of his men, after going over the top at Loos, in France.

In the main, Kipling disguised his desire to meddle in people's affairs - for their own good, of course - as concern and a wish to bring out the best in them. He bore the consequences, if we're to believe Haig's representation, just as he conducted the rest of his life, which is to say that he did not collapse under the weight of self-reproach, but instead tried to find ways to atone without admitting that war itself was wrong.

Haig's own physical resemblance to Rudyard Kipling had nothing on Daniel Radcliffe's similarity to the one solemn, bumfluff-moustached portrait of John Kipling I've seen. If the role hadn't required him to wear wire-rimmed specs and an expression of saintly forbearance, I wouldn't have thought of Harry Potter once. Heartbreakingly, in the trench scenes he looked like a child dressed as a man, too slight and too sweet to lead men to their deaths.

Kim Cattrall, on the other hand, who played Kipling's American wife, Carrie, wore more clothes in a single shot of this film than she did in six seasons of Sex and the City. She winced convincingly through countless exchanges with her Tigger-like, fervid husband, never truly permitted to tell him to sod off, but steely enough to speak her mind without upending the natural order of a marriage begun in the Victorian era.

Restrained and respectful, Haig's film had all the hallmarks - the sweeping music, the liberal use of clichés, I was willing to overlook in service to the greater drama, the palpable nostalgia - of a feature-length ITV1 film. What matters more is that he served the story of how Kipling's son lived and died both simply and well.

Pick of the week

The Omid Djalili Show
17 November, 9.30pm, BBC1
New sketch and stand-up show.

Dispatches: Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola
19 November, 8pm, C4
The activist-comedian investigates some dubious business practices.

Imagine: How to Get on in the Art World
20 November, 10.35pm, BBC1
Alan Yentob hits the Frieze Art Fair.

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