IT'S official - Tony's going. And even if you had only returned from a year's break on Mars this morning, you'd soon realise Mr Blair was vacating 10 Downing Street - as soon as you look at tonight's TV schedules.
First out of the blocks is Channel 4 with its The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair (8pm), which carries on from the first installment on Saturday night. Now, while talking-head documentaries, of which is one, are normally bobbins, largely because of the talking heads used, this is certainly the exception. Condoleezza Rice, Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson and Lord Ashdown are among the politicians on there - but perhaps most impressive of all is the number of former civil servants who appear on the show.
From Sir David Manning (Tony Blair's foreign advisor at the time of the Iraq war) to Sir Christopher Meyer (ex Washington ambassador), as each face popped up on Saturday, I found myself thinking how well presenter Andrew Rawnsley had done to get them to talk to camera. If Blair does watch these programmes, he must be feeling as though it's This Is Your Life - and that his invitation got lost.
Over on BBC 1 at 8.30pm (and watchable online here once the programme ends). Panorama does Trust Me, I'm Gordon, Not Tony, which will probably be as uncomfortable for Gordon Brown as Channel 4's offering is for Blair. Veteran journalist John Ware looks at Brown's track record for telling the truth and his use of political spin. I expect the conclusion that not as much as we'd like will change when Brown arrives at Number 10 on Thursday.
On a much lighter note, Rory Bremner gets his chance to have his say on Blair, the man he has mocked for a decade, on Tony Blair: My Part In His Downfall (C4, 11.05pm). The voiceover he did on the href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot03CNJgnE8 ">Culture Show sketchon BBC2 the other week is worth calling up on YouTube, and you just have to hope his Gordon Brown impersonation gets a bit better.
But over in href="http://www.channel4.com/player/v2/asx/showpresentation_omni.jsp?showId=7110">Hollyoaks (C4, 6.30pm) there's far too much going on to consider even thinking about the end of Blair's era. More importantly: Who pushed Clare off the balcony? There are five suspects - including Warren (business partner), Max (ex husband who has had his son put in care because of her), Justin (who got caught with Warren's sister after being set up by Clare) and Louise (Clare spilled the beans Louise's boyfriend that she'd had a baby aborted) - so it's classic whodunnit stuff. It might be on at 6.30pm, and sometimes seen as a teen drama, but Hollyoaks really has the writing to rival the 'bigger' soaps.
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