TELEVISION / Bits and pieces

'WELCOME to the Cyberzone,' intoned Craig Thomas, in an unconvincing attempt at vocal menace, 'where only appearance is meaning, where only conflict is relevence.' And where only gobbledegook is on the autocue. Somebody at the BBC has been casting an envious eye at Channel Four's Crystal Maze, an elaborate fantasy game-show, and at Gamesmaster, an over-designed computer games challenge. The result is an elaborately over-designed computer fantasy game- show challenge, the sole added twist being that all the action in Cyberzone takes place in virtual reality. Perhaps it is only appropriate that the excitement should be simulated too, whipped up by an audience apparently recruited from the teenagers who lurk in the games section at Dixon's. The set takes the film Alien as its visual benchmark, aiming at a grungy hi-tech in which the future has started to go rusty - rather comically a Reliant three-wheeler seems to have survived into the next century to serve as a futuristic space-buggy.

Craig Thomas also has a virtual catch-phrase - 'Awooga]' - which he repeats with medicinal regularity as if it might cure the programme of its essential anaemia. Judging from context it means practically anything you want it to, from 'My goodness, what a vexatious turn of events' to 'I'm so excited I am in danger of soiling my shell-suit'. When Thomas drops the cod-solemnity he is as engaging as always, jokily grovelling in front of John Barnes and John Fashanu, the celebrity competitors. Unfortunately the games themselves are slightly dull. The competitors - for some reason dressed as hospital orderlies - guide humanoid shapes around a blank simulated village, the individual buildings of which contain puzzles of insulting simplicity. The problem is that the complexity of programming an interactive game like this far outstrips the interest of the end result. Games manufacturers spend hundreds of thousands on their commercial games, something a television company simply can't afford to do. Even in this first episode some of the puzzles came round more than once and if they are to be repeated through the series audiences are likely to be driven virtually round the bend.

The credits for Punch Drunk (BBC 1) - a point-of-view montage of a boxer throwing left hooks and uppercuts - suggest that the viewer is in for a battering from what follows. It wasn't quite as stunning as that, but Clayton Moore's six-parter had a nicely acidic tone and a genuinely distinctive setting - the seedy world of small-time boxing. This is sometimes rough stuff - a number of gags were extracted from the plight of a badly battered loser with his broken jaw wired shut - and it displays a slightly troubled conscience by having a pair of dorkish anti-boxing campaigners on hand to put their case. It's no real contest of course: Moore clearly loves the game and has put lead in his own man's gloves.