Television Review

"WE BEGIN tonight," Juliet Morris announced, "with a story about people who claim they can picture what others are seeing without actually being anywhere near them. In fact, they could be thousands of miles apart... I know some of you may find the whole concept unlikely."

Well, maybe. Others of us wanted to point out that this phenomenon is usually referred to as "television", and Juliet was on it. Actually, it turned out that she was talking about something altogether more paranormal than that. Still, it is a feature of Cheap Trash to Boggle the Minds of Idiots (BBC1) - I'm so sorry, that should read Mysteries (BBC1) - that it seems to have no idea of what counts as genuinely mysterious. Last night's programme started out with the story of how an American government- employed psychic used her powers to catch a criminal - or not. Records are scanty and nobody has been able to establish how much the psychic knew in advance (the case had already been featured on TV, so she may have got her visions from external sources).

This was followed by an in-depth investigation into how Dewey McCall of Florida could run over his infant son, Dewey Jr, with a 12-ton bulldozer and not break any of the boy's bones. The contributions of engineers, doctors and geoscientists were rejected by Dewey Jr's parents, who favoured the more rational notion of divine intervention.

This was followed by a look at the Amsterdam air-crash of October 1992, in which an Israeli cargo plane hit two blocks of flats, killing 43 people. Figures in white spacesuits were observed at the scene; within months, local residents were complaining of mysterious rashes and aches, and the incidence of leukaemia had jumped. The plane turned out to have been carrying 20 tons of an unnamed cargo. Suggestions for what this might have been included depleted uranium and ingredients for nerve gas. Again, experts were wheeled on to pour cold water on these speculations; but given that Israel is a highly militarised country, with a long history of secret-weapons development, there seemed to be the bones of a real story here.

But Mysteries wraps up everything, beef and carrot-peelings, in the same package, with an insultingly cretinous title sequence that includes images of the Sphinx, leaping dolphins and Stonehenge. The real mystery here is that a public service broadcasting organisation is filling its primetime schedules with this nonsense.

Still, even if these days we can't congratulate ourselves quite so confidently for having the world's finest television, we can at least applaud ourselves for being able to recognise the best, given that The Sopranos (C4) was passed over at the Emmys. Last night's episode saw Tony Soprano poleaxed when a bent copper told him that his old pal, "Big Pussy", was an informer. As a realistic portrait of the sleaze and greyness of the criminal life, this was masterly; but it was also a marvellous summation of the themes that seem to run through the series - the possibility of betrayal, the terror of the future, the sheer aloneness of human life, everything bound together with a grey humour.

There were more bent policemen in Coppers (C4). The final part of this rather good, bluebottle's- eye-view of history examined increasing public cynicism about the honesty of the force. It included some startling footage from the Sixties, in which a policeman accused of beating a suspect with a rhino-whip said his only regret was that the incident had received so much publicity. A retired policeman recalled how, in the same era, a criminal had stood up in court to complain that a policeman had broken his jaw with a stick, only to be ignored by the judge. This segued into a more familiar litany of police scandals: the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad.

Meanwhile, in Daylight Robbery (ITV) the four women are finding that crime does not pay. The plot of this series is a clottish cross between Thelma and Louise and Widows, and a lot of the dramatic cruces are woefully underwritten - pregnant Geraldine Somerville's instant decision to join up as getaway driver being a prime example. But it does have compensating moments of domestic whimsy, like the rehearsal for a robbery, with cleaning spray standing in for a gun, and a three-piece suite rearranged to represent the getaway car. If these were given more elbow room, it would not be half bad.