Greg Dixon: 'Angels' makes it all worthwhile

Some years ago, at some cafe, on a Friday afternoon, I was asked a most impertinent question. An annoyingly blunt and haughty television journalist asked me if I actually liked television.

I seem to remember I spluttered somewhat. And then answered. 'Well yes, of course I like television.' Why would I watch it and write about it if I didn't like the damned medium in the first place?

I'm not sure whether this satisfied her or not, though in all probability she just wanted to wrong-foot me with the question. But it occurred to me only after our brief chat that I should have simply asked her another question in return: what sort of television was she talking about?

Frankly, as my regular readers will be unsurprised to learn, there are various species of television that I might loathe or at least scorn. But all known hate takes energy.

And while there is an enormous amount of rubbish on the box that's worthy of hate, I would rather, if I can, avoid it at all cost rather than expend my fast-dwindling vigour and shrinking brain matter consciously and intensely detesting it.

So forget hate. But occasionally I need television to remind me why I love some of it very much indeed. Sunday night's cluttered, dense and at times astounding mini-series Angels In America (TV One, 9.40) is a case in point.

It's an adaptation by Tony Kushner of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play and directed by Mike Nichols (who adapted the play Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? for the big screen in the 60s). It is a difficult piece of drama on every level.

Its story is all weighty stuff. In Reaganite America, two wholly dissimilar men are diagnosed with Aids against a backdrop of ignorance, 80s self-centred conservatism, politics, homosexuality, religion, love, sex. It's all in there.

And it's at times so dense and oppressive you feel yourself overwhelmed.

As well, its elaborate dramatic construction is visually dazzling as it moves between domestic drama and baroque magic realism, though sometimes with little ease.

Its script is heavily theatrical, filled with high-flown soliloquy and lyricism. There have been some marvellous, acerbic insights in its first two parts.

But more than once it has teetered into the overblown.

So the first episodes of this six-parter have, then, been the sort of television that confounds, provokes and exasperates as much as it entertains. And I'm sure plenty have hated it.

But if you've kept watching Angels in America, you can't have failed to have felt something more complex than simply liking or disliking it. There is too much going on for just that.

This is television which demands something of its viewers and returns the investment by being, at turns, funny and clever and bleak and uplifting and infuriating and engrossing and eye-popping and mad.

And it makes me like television very much indeed.