TELEVISION has always been regarded as a poor man’s film, an even poorer man’s theatre, a pauper’s novel.

It’s the bad parent’s babysitter, the drug of the masses, the enemy of conversation and education.

An actor who finds themselves reduced from movie stardom to the corner of a living room is an object of pity who will never again escape to the world of glitz and glamour.

“Television has raised writing to a new low,” filmmaker Samuel Goldwyn once noted.

This week I caught up with two films I’d wanted to see for a while.

The first was Ben Affleck’s multiple Oscar-winner Argo. I enjoyed it. But I didn’t know much about the events it portrayed, so I looked it up.

This was where the film fell down for me.

The real life 1979 hostage drama in which six US diplomats were rescued from Iran was popularly nicknamed ‘The Canadian Caper’.

It was called that for a reason. Canadians planned the operation and were the major key to its success. In Argo, one CIA man does it all.

Artistic licence is often needed to make a story work. But in this case what really happened was just as daring, brave and exciting as the fake version.

The second film was Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra – a portrait of pianist Liberace and his young lover Scott Thorsen.

The film was rejected by the major studios as ‘too gay’, but Soderbergh stuck with it, as did his stars, Michael Douglas and Matt Damon.

The go-ahead eventually came from TV channel HBO.

Soderbergh has said that making a made-for-TV movie gave him the freedom to make the film he wanted to make.

And it's a gem - a sparkling, bejewelled, sequin-filled joy with depths of pathos that have little to do with sexuality and everything to do with humanity.

Douglas gives the performance of his life. Damon isn't far off.

They aren't eligible for Oscars because it was a TV movie. But they knew that when they did it.

They knew that a great story can be told in the pages of a book, on a stage or on a big screen - even on the idiot box in the corner.