TV review: The War You Don't See | Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town | Beautiful Equations

War reporters may not be as witless as John Pilger claims, but he presents his case with passion

Overwhelming evidence . . . John Pilger in The War You Don’t See. Photograph: ITV

I'd rather assumed ITV had abandoned aspirations to anything other than light entertainment. So it was a surprise – and the occasion of renewed respect – to find John Pilger's The War You Don't See (ITV1) getting the best part of two hours' airtime; even if a start time of 10.35pm did ensure that almost everyone who didn't see the war wouldn't see this programme either.

This was Pilger's J'accuse, in which he indicted UK and US media for allowing itself to be manipulated by governments into misreporting or ignoring every global conflict since the second world war. This had the feel of slight overkill: Pilger's starting point is that all governments are shysters whose only interest is economic and all journalists are witless dupes. My own suspicion is that the reality is more nuanced: that self-delusion is an abiding principle of the human condition. Politicians convince themselves they are acting within a moral framework even when they clearly aren't and journalists believe they are telling an objective truth; so the narrative that emerges is a collusion of mutual self-deception.

But Pilger has never traded in anything other than black and white. For all his lack of subtlety, he presents his case with passion and conviction. Particularly when he concentrated on Iraq and Afghanistan. For there is an undeniable truth at its heart. You could see it in the faces of Fran Unsworth, BBC2's head of newsgathering, and Artist and critic Matthew Collings did a lot of nodding during Beautiful Equations (BBC4) but I'm guessing – hoping – he came away understanding as little as me. It was a nice idea to make a film about how equations describe nature but it came up against the brick wall that all science populists always seem to hit. There are some things you just can't make intelligible to the lay person. So while I already knew that e=mc² and accept that it contains an eternal truth, I was still none the wiser why it was so groundbreaking. Or why, if I walk away from someone and come back, our time is out of kilter. Or how the hell Paul Dirac's equation proved the existence of anti-matter. Collings was much taken by the scientific insistence on the beauty of equations – the idea that only a beautiful equation could be right. But where was the equation for beauty itself?