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Viewers who tuned into Spectacle, the Sundance Channel's widely syndicated Elvis Costello TV talk show, could be forgiven for finding it a very rum affair indeed--the phrase "poacher-turned-gamekeeper" springing rather too readily to mind.

The first show proffered Costello as the avuncular host, clipboard in hand, bowling gentle daisy-cutters at fellow new wave grandees the Police. Perhaps no-one had reminded the host of his performance on a 1980 BBC Radio One Round Table review show during which he'd opined that, "Somebody should clip Sting around the head and tell him to stop singing in that ridiculous Jamaican accent..."--his unequivocal parting shot about the Police that evening: "I can't stand them."

Spectacle offers a deeply incongruous scenario for anyone who recalls Costello as the spiky iconoclast of the late 1970s--an artist trading in righteous anger and invective who carried a vicious masonry nail as a weapon and a "black book" of music biz adversaries and who later foreswore interviews altogether. With all that in mind, there was something fatally undermining about the "spectacle" of Declan Patrick Aloysius McManus mugging merrily along with Messrs Sumner, Copeland and Summers (notwithstanding that he'd spent the autumn touring the States in support of the recently reconstituted peroxide constabulary). The resistance guerrilla turned Quisling, perhaps?

Naturally, mellowness comes with age. Costello is an urbane 54, happily married and an habitué of the opera house. But while no-one expects the one-time poet laureate of "emotional fascism" to swim forever in bile, can he really have relinquished all scruples and critical faculties just to be on the telly with some other famous musos?

It wasn't just the fawning, anodyne banality of his enquiries that stuck in the craw during the Police show ("what's your favorite Police song" he asked the haughty Sting, who faux-diplomatically volunteered two of the handful of numbers he'd ever allowed his compadres to pen but the obsequious display of "showbiz" cordiality between punk's erstwhile poisoned penman and his self-confessed former bêtes noires. Frankly, from Costello we expect a bit more.

Despite hackle-raising portents--the oh-so-witty title, executive production by Elton John--Spectacle's premise seemed initially promising. Costello is renowned for his eclectic fandom, his cache of arcane cover versions and articulate forays into music writing, notably for Vanity Fair. All the more reason to expect Spectacle to rise above the kind of trite toadying and luvvy back-slapping so beloved of that other sycophantic new wave escapee-turned bumptious master of ceremonies, Jools Holland.

To be fair, Spectacle's subsequent cozying-up sessions with Rufus Wainwright and Elton John were marginally less nausea-inducing--the latter saved by a duet on the late David Ackles' sublime "Down River". As I write the Bill Clinton show has yet to be aired; it's safe to suppose that questions about Whitewater, cigars and Oval Office interns will not be gracing Elvis's clipboard.

Don't expect a genteel ramble through the history of US soul music with Stephen Stills any day soon, either.

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