TV Eye: Wall-to-wall 9/11

American satirist Bill Maher was a guest on Larry King Live a couple of weeks ago, discussing CNN's planned saturation coverage of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, as it has become known. Maher's big fear, he quipped, was that President Bush would turn on the TV, see CNN's footage of the 2001 attacks and think, "Oh my God, we're being attacked again."

Over the past five years, there have been so many documentaries, docu-dramas, analyses and now movies about 9/11 - what happened before, during and after - you'd think there'd be nothing new to add. But each anniversary produces yet another wave of programmes and this week's coverage seems almost as intense as the first anniversary.

There's been some debate about ABC's two-part drama, The Path to 9/11, which screened here on Sunday and Monday and was purported to reveal the eight-year lead-up to 9/11 and American intelligence agencies' attempts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Bill Clinton's office cried foul before it even screened in the US, claiming inaccuracies and distortions. The Path to 9/11 may not have shown the Clinton Administration in a particularly efficient light, but it was gripping drama, starred Harvey Keitel and the bottom line was: they didn't get bin Laden.

CNN ran 9/11-related programming right through the weekend, culminating in an all-out glut on Monday which I avoided by coming to work. It re-ran Christiane Amanpour's documentary on bin Laden, which highlighted her ongoing fondness for cliches - "the heat was on ... he was feeling the heat", etc.

CNN ran a panel on Sunday discussing the "terror situation" in which its Baghdad correspondent told the host how Iraqis blamed the American invasion for the rise of terrorism in their own country. The host didn't seem to quite understand this. "All depends on your perspective," he said glibly and moved on.

That's the trouble with CNN. They may have some good reporters, but the hosts are often lousy.

Prime's acknowledgment of the anniversary was a surprisingly interesting two-hour docu-drama made by the BBC called 9/11: The Day the World Changed, in which real footage of the attacks on the Twin Towers was woven into interviews with survivors and re-enactments of the plight of people in the buildings after the planes hit.

Those towers were terribly flawed. The sprinklers didn't work. The stairs were too narrow. There was no rescue plan. And the automated public notice system kept telling people to return to their work stations.

What was most intriguing about the production was that for the first time in any 9/11 coverage I've seen so far some people admitted to being cowards and/or putting themselves first. It showed an actor playing the part of one poor guy who froze with fear on the stairs and refused to keep going down. He simply gave up. Unfortunately, another man - a real Mr Positive type - wouldn't give up on him and kept trying to get him back on his feet. They both died. One of their companions - a man who had also tried to get the man moving - fled to save his own skin. He lived.

This man, the one who took off, had earlier spent some time sitting in his smoke-filled office, alone, refusing to budge because he hadn't been instructed to evacuate. What a telling comment on the human condition when it was, literally, under fire.