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Metro Homeland was a masterclass in mixed emotions as Carrie confronted Brody TV review: Homeland's recent change of course has worked a treat, given that the show is strongest when Carrie and Brody circle each other like wounded animals. Homeland season 2 There was a worry when the credits rolled on last week’s Homeland (C4). After Carrie’s explosion at Brody – ‘you’re a traitor and a terrorist and now it’s time you paid for that’ – where did we have left to go? Surely a show that had been fuelled by knife-edge tension had fatally blown its cover. It felt like a finale though we were only four episodes in. Unmasking Brody and watching him squirm might have appeased America’s patriot lobby but there was a danger it would take the wind out of Homeland’s dramatic sails. Amazingly, though I’d have happily tagged along with Brody’s rise through the political ranks for several more episodes, the change of course worked a treat. Homeland is strongest when Carrie and Brody (Claire Danes and Damian Lewis) are circling each other like wounded animals and to have them squaring off in an interrogation room, a confrontation that took the lion’s share of the action, was a masterclass in mixed emotions. ‘You broke my heart you know,’ she told him. ‘Was that easy for you, was that fun?’ If we weren’t sure whether to believe her or not, what hope did Brody have? Yet even though he’s in the tightest spot he’s ever wriggled into – including the hell-hole cave where it all started – it’s impossible to shake the feeling that Brody still has more skins to shed before we get to the sinew and bone of where he’s really at. That’s the hope and the hook of Homeland. What did Downton Abbey have? A cricket match. By Keith Watson - 5th November. 2012 The Gurardian Rewind TV: Brazil with Michael Palin; Rich Hall's Inventing the Indian; Top Gear: 50 Years of Bond Cars; Exposure: Banaz – An Honour Killing – review They've got an awful lot of cliches in Michael Palin's Brazil, but there's nothing cosy about Rich Hall's Native American tale Brazil with Michael Palin (BBC1) | iPlayer Rich Hall's Inventing the Indian (BBC4) | iPlayer Top Gear: 50 Years of Bond Cars (BBC2) | iPlayer Exposure: Banaz – An Honour Killing (ITV1) | ITV Player Were a contest held for the most genial man on television, only the most vain and foolhardy would dare to go up against Michael Palin. The former Python is so nice that he can make even that saintly knight David Attenborough look like a professional grouch. No matter where he goes in the world, he unfailingly packs his diffident smile and self-effacing banter. You can understand why members of remote mountain tribes who have never seen the cheese shop sketch still feel an instinctive warmth toward this engaging Englishman with his awkward decency and gentle quips. He appears utterly accepting of everyone he encounters. This is his strength as a traveller, but also the weakness of his popular travelogues, and never more glaringly than in his latest series, Brazil With Michael Palin. As he states in the credit sequence, although he's roamed the globe for 25 years, he had never previously been to the world's fifth largest country. Yet now he's made the effort, you wonder why he bothered. The first two shows have been a whistlestop tour of cultural cliches whose rehashing in no way required his presence. In the first episode, he visited north-east Brazil, where he discovered that Brazilians are obsessed with festivals and dancing. Not even the most unpromising neighbourhood shindig was safe from his jolly attendance as he crisscrossed the region's vast terrain in search of anywhere with colourful costumes and a rhythmic beat. Like the affable bobby at the Notting Hill carnival, he was only too happy to perform the role of clumsy white foil to uninhibited dark sensuousness. But in best travel guide tradition, Brazil is a nation of contrasts, so last week Palin took off into the Amazon rainforest to visit indigenous tribespeople, whose way of life, he told us, is very different from that of their countrymen in the big cities. For, deep in the jungle, they are obsessed with... festivals and dancing. Like some middle-class Prince Philip in chinos, Palin watched one ceremony after another, heroically maintaining a face of good-humoured interest. Who knows what he really thought, but any curiosity this viewer may previously have harboured about Amazonian tribal rituals in honour of the spirits of river fish is now comprehensively satisfied. The truth is that, whether prancing around in warpaint or waiting for modernity to swallow them up, the tribespeople were just walk-on exotics – literally in the case of one old naked man who wandered into shot wearing what looked like either a codpiece in the shape of an erection or simply an erection with no codpiece. As though in surreal homage to Monty Python, Palin continued talking about suspended hammocks. Palin noted that there are now only a fraction of the 5 million indigenous people in Brazil that were there when Europeans first arrived. By some accounts, the death count in North America was even worse. In Rich Hall's Inventing the Indian, the word "genocide" was used by at least one contributor. While that may not have been the explicit aim of American expansion, it was too often the result, if only as a consequence of the spread of European infectious diseases. As an exercise in sociopolitical anthropology, Inventing the Indian was the kind of sharply droll essay we have come to expect from Hall, following the irregular QI guest's equally rousing forays into American history, How the West Was Lost and The Dirty South. But as an appreciation of cinema, it lacked the depth and richness of the former, for the very good reason that the cinematic depiction of Native Americans has, with few exceptions, been a travesty of concocted stereotypes. As sometime-comedian presenters go, Hall is the anti-Palin: opinionated, provocative and about as cosy as a wire-wool jockstrap. Although his set expression – a sort of stoic alarm – puts me in mind of Steve McQueen, he doesn't subscribe to his fellow American's taciturnity. Throughout some of his lengthier and more splenetic diatribes, Hall demonstrated no discernible desire or need to breathe. And when (accurately) describing James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans as a "bloated, turgid orotund work of spectacular historical misrepresentation", he sounded in danger of his own bloated orotundity. But then self-critical parody was a playful theme in a serious film. Hall tore into the way that white people, such as Kevin Costner, insisted on becoming spokespeople for the pain of Native Americans. As the impassioned and conspicuously white Hall repeated the same sin, Dallas Goldtooth, an activist-comedian from the Dakota tribe, shook his head with mock disapproval. The unstated part of the joke was that Hall is said to be part Cherokee. During an appearance on Top Gear, Hall once made up a song about the mundane Rover 25. Top Gear: 50 Years of Bond Cars could have done with that brand of inventiveness. Instead, there was Richard Hammond working himself into paroxysms of pleasure over the many cars 007 has driven across 50 years of the film franchise. As Hammond is permanently situated on or around the trigger point of auto-climax, there was nothing particularly novel about that. There were a couple of good anecdotes about the impecunious early days of the film series, when the budget was pushed to the limit to hire a Sunbeam Alpine for 12 shillings a day and Aston Martin repeatedly refused to loan the film-makers one of its cars. But the effect of multiple spectacular stunts and crashes all slammed together threatened to do the impossible and dampen my appetite for the new Bond film. Nor was Hammond helped by his interviews with Roger Moore, who was always too camp to appreciate the Bond iconography (he claimed his favourite Bond car was a 2CV), and the director Guy Hamilton, who was responsible for guiding the series into its 1970s slump. Filmed against sunny backdrops of yacht-filled marinas, the octogenarian Moore and nonagenarian Hamilton might be said to be living the Bond dream. Except dreams, like Bond himself, are never meant to age. It's the privilege of each generation to look back at its predecessor and pronounce with bewildered relief that it was a different time back then. We've heard that conclusion a lot in relation to Jimmy Savile's recently revealed activities. Let's hope the next generation will say the same thing about the forced marriages and so-called honour killings of which countless young women continue to be silent victims. Exposure: Banaz – An Honour Killing was a powerful indictment of the misogynistic control that menaces some communities, and the misplaced cultural sensitivity that allows it to go unchallenged. This told the story of Banaz Mahmod, a Londoner who fled an arranged marriage to a violent rapist and brought a death sentence upon herself by falling in love with a man from a different Kurdish clan. Her family arranged her garroting, then many in the Kurdish community tried to subvert the police inquiry. The police estimate that more than 50 people were involved. What made it all the more shocking was that Mahmod had been to the police several times to warn them that she was about to be murdered. Nothing was done. This excellent film reminded us that "honour killings" are often collective crimes committed by individuals who are supported by extended networks. When the day arrives that such murders bring not honour but only shame, the killers will face the communal rejection they most fear. Unfortunately, as things stand, the people in hiding are those who stood by Mahmod. By Andrew Anthony