THE Kennedys (Friday, BBC2 9pm; Saturday, BBC2, 10.45pm) was such a controversial acquisition for BBC2 that a whole evening of JFK-themed programming was built around the first two episodes.

Would this mini-series from Joel Surnow – the conservative-leaning creator of 24 – turn out to be the right-wing hatchet job that some have alleged?

Or would it prove to be an honest warts-and-all account about which the Kennedy family have been too sensitive? What became clear early on was that this was a drama about politicians which contained no politics at all.

The ambition and the sex drive of the Kennedy clan were there in spades but you wouldn’t have deduced from this show whether America’s 35th president was a conservative, a liberal or a member of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

On the other hand, you didn’t need to guess what motivated the Kennedys because, as in most soap operas, the characters never kept a thought to themselves. We didn’t need to work out that Joe Kennedy was trying to live out his own thwarted political ambitions through his sons because he kept telling us so. And when Joe Junior volunteered for the wartime flying mission that would kill him, we didn’t have to speculate that he was jealous of his younger brother Jack already having a medal of honour, because he said so.

The Kennedy women were surprisingly under-represented. There was no sense of how the matriarch Rose dominated the family, while Jack’s adored sister Kathleen – who married into aristocracy and died in a plane crash – didn’t rate a mention. Katie Holmes as Jackie, meanwhile, was presented only as the long-suffering victim of Jack’s philandering.

Greg Kinnear looked astonishingly convincing as JFK and delivered a real performance rather than an impersonation – but on the whole the Kennedys were too reminiscent of the Ewings.

Kennedy Home Movies (Saturday, BBC2, 8pm) was no more enlightening, consisting of archive footage overlaid with narration from the memoirs of various Kennedy nannies – all read in that dreary of tone of voice which tells us we’re being treated to a look at the subject’s dark side.

It was John Sergeant, a guest on a Kennedy-themed edition of The Culture Show (Saturday, BBC2, 9.45pm), who offered the evening’s most insightful remark about the continuing fascination with JFK.

Kennedy’s presidency was so tragically short, he said, that we never saw him do anything twice.

While BBC2 was busy re-living the Kennedy era, BBC1 was touting the return of variety with Lee Mack’s All Star Cast (Saturday, BBC1, 9.40pm).

In fact, this was not so much a variety show as a hybrid containing stand-up comedy, chat, music, some Graham Norton-style audience participation and, along the way, Mack and some celebrity guests in a sketch that could have been written for Morecambe and Wise.

It’s an odd recipe, but Mack, who wrote the scripted parts himself, is just about the quickest wit on television. By laughing along with the members of the public, rather than mocking them, the show became engaging as well as laugh-out-loud funny. Also worth a chuckle this week was Wimbledon: not on the BBC but on Sky News.

The All England championship is still one of the sporting “crown jewels” which is (for now, at least) preserved for the BBC. So the normally big-budget Sky operation is reduced to sending reporters to stand outside the ground and describe what we would have seen if we had been inside – or watching BBC.