From time to time, The South Bank Show, ITV's wafer-thin grip on its promises to cover the arts, manages to succeed both in terms of what it would like to do (covering a subject with some depth) and what the channel bosses would prefer it concentrated on doing (reporting about someone the usual ITV viewer might have heard of). Last night's edition of the programme - now sponsored by Barclay's Private Banking - was one where it pulled off the trick.

Of course, having Melvyn Bragg interview Jeanette Winterson was a mix that couldn't go wrong; the two are cut from the same cloth: Winterson deeply rooted in the north of England, roving over the hills above Accrington where she would go as a girl, to try and escape her mother (not easy - someone had presented Mrs. Winterson with a pair of binoculars left over from the war); Bragg is equally tied to the northern hills, his novels and heart centred a few miles to the north in the Lake District. Interestingly, Winterson described her childhood wilderness as being her lake district "only without water". A further similarity between Winterson and Bragg lies in Winterson's early years, raised in an environment of the righteous certainty of the evangelical; Melvyn, of course, has been ennobled by Tony Blair.

It was a curious decision to cut in so much of the BBC adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit to illustrate Jeanette's early years, especially so in the context of the interview, which explored again the gap between fiction and biography in Winterson's work, and explicitly the differences between her childhood and the story told in 'Oranges'; Jeanette telling of how her mother visited her and said "this wasn't like that, and that wasn't like that...", her exasperated daughter saying "But that's because it's fiction..." Worse, the sadness of seeing Charlotte Coleman living out Jess' life on screen - especially the scenes full of hope and passion about the future - made your heart ache for a different story, a different ending, which was quite distracting. But the archive allowed for a neat counterpoint, cutting from the scene in 'Oranges' where the faithful get harangued by lads driving-by ("Holy Joes - use yer bible to wipe yer bum") to Jeanette, having to reshoot a scene outside Accrington library after a vanload of hollering careered across the back of the shot. Wisely, the producers didn't abut the scene of Charlotte Coleman scrambling over the stone monument above Accrington with the scenes they'd shot of Winterson talking at the same place - they held back to allow it come as a small tickle rather than a point rammed home; a trust in the audience having an attention span.