For all the humanity in Julie Walters' bravura portrayal of the late Mo Mowlam, last week's Channel 4 film pandered to some old prejudices.
owlam was hard work even before her sad decline -- she was one of nature's incurable huggers, after all.
And Channel 4's analysis seemed to be cut from the same fuzzy feel-good cloth, just like this week's ecstatic claims about the DUP-SF deal which presupposes a degree of tolerance that does not exist.
In it, Mowlam continuously refers to Ireland, conjuring up the image of some roiling, undifferentiated wilderness.
Did she even know the difference between the Government of Ireland Act (1920) and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the title deeds of the two separate states she lumped together?
One can only wonder.
The left wing of the British Labour Party to which she belonged was, of course, hostile to unionism, especially during the Eighties, and did not like to use the term Northern Ireland.
Channel 4 reflected this prejudice with a vulgar portrait of David Trimble.
The most creative and unusual unionist leader since 1920 came across as a sour, hectoring village solicitor, who spoke as if he had been weaned on a pickle, something said about Calvin Coolidge, 30th US President and a dead ringer for the Trimble character.
Channel 4 did not give us any sense of Trimble's political creativity.
It did not mention the fact that he went straight to meet the then Taoiseach John Bruton in Dublin in 1995 after Trimble was elected leader of the UUP, much to the chagrin of diplomats like Sean O hUiginn in the Department of Foreign Affairs, who saw him as a fawning clone of Ian Paisley.
Trimble, of course, surprised his critics by signing up to a power-sharing agreement, by ultimately dropping the reasonable demand for a prior surrendering of arms, one first made by Dick Spring after all, and by doggedly fighting the good fight in his own party.
Like a Protestant Cuchulainn, Trimble died on his feet.
His speech in Oslo in 2001 on the occasion of his Nobel award showed the full extent of his historical sophistication and political pluralism.
Northern Ireland, he said, had been a cold house for Catholics, and he set his face against what he called "a dark sludge of historical sectarianism, [which] both communities must leave behind, because both created it".
Just like Harold Wilson and Ken Livingstone in the Seventies and Eighties, Channel 4's programme showed that it is much more fascinated by the hard men.
In this programme, Adams and McGuinness are presented as straight-shooters (pardon the pun) who are kind enough to tell Mo to her face that they want to speak to Tony and Jonathan Powell about the major issues, rather than just waste their time in airless rooms with a mere Secretary of State.
(Channel 4 was right though to have them emphasise prisoner releases here, since Adams lost on every major constitutional question in 1998, and did not even want the executive and assembly they are now so keen on.)
Channel 4 sees Adams and McGuinness as latter day Collinses and Pearses.
It has Mowlam say at one point that the negotiations between Blair and Provisional Sinn Fein was the first time in 80 years that HMG had met with Irish republicans in Downing Street.
This muddled analysis is from the same playbook as the constant references to an undifferentiated Ireland. Like many on the British left over the years, Channel 4 finds it easier to pretend that the 1969-1994 nightmare was just a re-run of the 1913-23 period, and thereby would have its audience ignore the fact that the PIRA was a wholly distinct beast, one forged in the white sectarian heat of the 1970s.
As Eamon Collins's riveting book, Killing Rage, showed, Adams and McGuinness were products of a new kind of sectarianism, Ribbonmen with rifles in fact, unlike anything that had come before in their paranoia and enmities.
The Northern takeover of the IRA, aided and abetted by Haughey and Blaney of course, brought an unprecedented pitilessness to the nationalist enterprise.
After all, the PIRA managed to kill more innocent Catholics during its campaign than all the security forces combined, a melancholy set of statistics that Channel 4 forgot to mention amid the monologues about drunken Orangemen and Mandelson's fella.
These anti-unionist prejudices of the British left have managed to warp finer minds than even Ken Loach or Ken Livingstone.
One finds the same blind spot for example, the same emotional inability to appreciate the democratic arguments of modern unionism even in the work of Hugo Young, the doyen of the British liberal commentariat before his tragic early death from cancer in 2003.
Young wrote the outstanding biography of Mrs Thatcher, One of Us, but even here, in a book distinguished by its insight and sophistication, Young lapsed into Channel 4 mode when discussing Northern Ireland.
Unionists are dismissed in his chapter on the Anglo-Irish Agreement as nobody's children, because of their plantation extremism and their sad addiction to that lethal intoxicant, the unionist veto.
We get nothing from Young, or from Channel 4, on, say, the pluralism of Edgar Graham, the young devolutionist academic who was murdered on a Queen's University quad by the PIRA in 1983 because he looked like he could be a future UUP leader, one whom they couldn't portray as a Cromwellian drone.
Neither do they tell us that the PIRA opposed the Sunningdale agreement in 1974, brandishing a veto that proved far more bloody than anything James Molyneaux, John Major or Trimble could muster.
Those who are tired of the peace process fairytale -- dominated by the Good Witch who is bankrolled by the republican peace strategy and the Wicked Witch who has a cat called No Surrender -- should dig into Dean Godson's book on Trimble, Himself Alone.
This should be on David Cameron's bedside table.
Rather than echoing the condescension of the old British left, Godson analyses the better angels of the unionist nature.
They haven't gone away either, you know.
John-Paul McCarthy is a history tutor at Exeter College, Oxford
