The deadpan look is a favourite on the small screen this week. Politicians, actors playing politicians and actors playing forensic anthropologists are all sporting the look as if their careers depend on it.
For elite bureaucrats of the People's Republic of China, that may very well have been true. Case in point, the swift departure of Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang from the political scene after his impassioned speech in sympathy with students and citizen activists during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Losing composure in public can have dire consequences.
Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the June 4 killings in Beijing that shook onlookers around the world. While none of us would hope to see the heat and blood of that conflict on display again, it remains a significant landmark in the history of a people trying to come out from under 5,000 years of authoritarian rule. Declassified - Tiananmen Square (right; The History Channel; tonight at 10pm) - a half-hour programme firmly American in production and tone - offers hindsight on June 4 with the help of comments from student protest leaders such as Lu Li, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and, poignantly, Canadian-Chinese journalist and erstwhile Red Guard Jan Wong, who covered the two-month-long protest leading up to June 4 and chronicled her experiences in the book Red China Blues.
The programme traces the build-up of national tension back to the last years of Mao Zedong in the 1960s and the Venerated Deng's rise to power through the 70s, using 'previously secret Chinese state documents' such as the memoirs of Mao's personal physician. It charts the teetering balance of power between conservatives and reformers within the party in an attempt to explain how something that started as a peaceful student petition for fairly minor improvements morphed into an uprising of millions, setting the stage for military suppression.
Watch as Deng Xiaoping - returning from exile, making a speech, meeting with dissident students - holds the same expression in the best and worst of times.
In the fictional world of British political thriller State of Play (a repeat on BBC Entertainment; Thursdays at 8.10pm), rising parliamentary star Stephen Collins (David Morrissey; Holding On) uses his stony composure to hide emotions of more salacious origins. The six-part serial begins with the murder of a young man in, what investigators assume, was a drug deal gone wrong, and the apparently coincidental death of a young researcher for Collins. Journalist Cal McAffrey (John Simm; Life on Mars), as Collins' former campaign manager, positions himself as the only person the politician can trust in an escalating media frenzy. As McAffrey and his colleagues, including Della Smith (Kelly Macdonald; No Country For Old Men) and Cameron Foster (Bill Nighy; Love Actually), dig deeper into the deaths, it appears that not only are they connected, but they are linked to conspiracy and corruption in high places. Thumbs up for Paul Abbott's tightly written, critically acclaimed series - the American film adaptation of which is coming to cinemas soon. Go and see that if you must but don't miss the original if you haven't already seen it.