Like many institutions facing public scorn or indifference, Parliament has decided to explain itself through the medium of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Inside the Commons (3 February) was the result; revealing, but only to a degree. Michael Cockerell, writer and presenter of this four-part series, promised it would be “the House of Commons as you’ve never seen it before”. And this was undeniably accurate: normally television coverage is tightly controlled, whereas Cockerell’s cameras roamed widely. What they showed us was an institution struggling to reconcile the needs of a modern legislature with centuries of tradition and housed in a nineteenth-century building in constant need of attention. Most viewers will not have been surprised by any of that, but this do