The Special Relationship
BBC2

Whisper it softly, but I think I may be growing tired of the Peter Morgan/Michael Sheen roadshow. I loved The Deal, when Sheen's uncanny and slightly camp impersonation of Tony Blair was still a novelty, and The Queen was bliss.

But The Special Relationship (18 September, 9.30pm) felt - somewhat ironically, given how often it mentioned Bill Clinton's sui generis erection - more than a little flaccid.

The point it made - that it was during the Kosovo crisis that Blair developed his taste for war, presumably because he thought it was a cast-iron guarantee of eternal superstardom - was too laboured and the narrative lacked friction, which left it underpowered. In The Deal, the conflict was Blair v Brown; in The Queen, it was the old establishment v the new. Here, for all that the naughty Bill Clinton (Dennis Quaid) was not quite sokeen on an invasion of Kosovo as Blair, the two leaders were essentially involved in a love-in. For Blair, this was a kind of foreplay, given his later relationship with George W Bush. As I watched, the suspicion grew that I was being dealt a form of high-class gossip.

There were enjoyable moments. There was something creepily thrilling about appearing to see the Blairs - or the Clintons, come to that - in the privacy of their bedrooms, and one felt instinctively that some of Morgan's guesswork as a writer was absolutely right. In an early scene, Cherie (Helen McCrory, again) compared the feeble support she received at No 10 to the gold-service White House team that surrounded Hillary Clinton (Hope Davis). Blair, who was in the bath, said: "Would it help if I sent Jonathan [Powell, his chief of staff] out to buy a Filofax?" Hee hee. Twelve years on, no wonder she's always flashing her chequebook at the man from Foxtons. I was convinced, too, by the bawdiness of Alastair Campbell (Mark Bazeley) after the Lewinsky scandal broke. "Eatin' ain't cheatin'!" he announced charmingly, as he and Cherie discussed, in technical terms, what precisely counts as infidelity.

But, for a film that wanted to deal with such huge events, there was something peculiarly telescoped about the production. Britain, according to this version of the tale, was run by just three men: Blair, Campbell and Powell (Adam Godley). We never saw anyone else. Couldn't a walk-on part have been found for good old Robin Cook? Mark Gatiss, late of The League of Gentlemen, would have been excellent in the role. In the White House, Clinton's only adviser seemed to be poor old Hills - though the producer had stumped up for a chocolate Labrador to play Buddy. Without
the presence of the brilliant Quaid, who caught Clinton's tone so exquisitely - the former president had a high-in-saturated-fats kind of a voice; it made him sound like he was always on the point of either an orgasm or a heart attack - the whole thing would have felt desperately cheap. It's my belief that they blew the entire budget on the presidential helicopter. Directors can't resist the lure of windswept hair beneath roaring rotor blades.

Still, I will give Morgan this: there was a moment - it was done quite casually, but it froze me to the core - when the script really nailed our dear ex-prime minister. In the dining room at Chequers, Blair apologised to Clinton for having briefed the American press against him, something he did in an effort to win US support for further Nato action in Kosovo (and also because he was desperate not to be isolated). Clinton looked at him, all fat fingers and steel. "That's bullshit," he said. "You don't mean a word of it." Blair's response was just right. He gave a kind of half-shrug, but there was no embarrassment written on Sheen's elfin features, nor did he feel the need to protest.

On paper, it was always thought to be Clinton who, of the two men, had the thicker skin. He was the one who, supposedly, was able to lie with the most alacrity. But this is wrong. Arrows buckle and fold at the very sight of Blair's leathery epidermis. We shoot and shoot and nothing ever seems to hit home.