TELEVISION / Seriously misunderstood

PERHAPS it's all those repeats, or just the prickly weather, but columnists are itching to join in the elite sport of box- knocking. The rules are simple enough: players try to take the high ground, shouting 'couch potato' as they swerve past us starchy horizontals. Bonus points are awarded for each cry of 'Imported US Trash': conclusive proof that the player has never seen Roseanne or Cheers: indeed, has probably been uncontaminated by any actual television viewing for several years. It's a little early to talk prizes, but Melanie Phillips put in a remarkable performance in the Observer, notching an early Imported US Trash before kicking a Mindless Entertainment into touch. 'Television,' she wrote, 'promotes incoherence and triviality, and transforms everything into show business.' It was interesting to consider the idea that 'serious television is a contradiction in terms' in a week when Bloody Bosnia (C4) made human darkness so visible you felt like watching it with a crucifix in your hand.

Night after night the bombardment went on. There was the woman in Refugee Stories who got back from picking fruit in the orchard to find her husband and three children with their throats slit on the kitchen floor; the man in The Unforgiving who can't forget the tunes playing on a radio when Muslim prisoners were forced to bite off each other's testicles. The music was loud, he said, but the screaming was louder. And everywhere, the gutted houses with vacant, black windows, as if someone had put out their eyes. The big guns (reporters Maggie O'Kane and Nik Gowing, financier George Soros) went for your head, while smaller ones made guerrilla raids on your heart under cover of lightness.

A jauntily coruscating Tourist Sarajevo 93 explained How to Get Around Town: basically, run like hell. It was impossible to answer any of the ethnic questions - 'Is this Bosnian family Muslim, Serbian, Croatian or Mixed?' - which was just as well: the prize was a one-way ticket to Sarajevo. The film's solemn coda on Europe's shame was redundant: laughter is the best embarrassment. By 11pm Thursday, after a howling mother had scrabbled through the earth to disinter her small son, and an alleged Serb torturer had taken you on an upbeat tour of the facilities ('There was no physical contact between those questioned and the inspectors'), you were ready to surrender. OK, OK, just don't show the pictures of that mortared Sarajevo bread queue again. All you wanted was a bit of peace which, unfunnily enough, was what they wanted, too.

The idea of a Bosnia season was faintly queasy, coming after a similar exercise on behalf of dinosaurs. But no one could accuse Channel 4 of cheap ratings-grabbing here: with such material, an expensive ratings loss is more likely. Just once or twice, the whiff of self-congratulation became a bad smell. In Artists for Bosnia, for example, there was little danger that Ute Lemper, smouldering her way through Kurt Weill, would make the Bosnian Serbs get off Mount Igman.

Elsewhere, realising that it's no longer the thought that counts, C4 emphasised action, asking viewers to make donations. The appeal became hard to resist as the slow drip-drip of nightly news reports was overtaken by a tide of indignation. Wary viewers will have resisted being swept away: it looked cowardly not to have at least one film examining the risks of military intervention - almost as cowardly as the stars of Nik Gowing's splendidly acid Diplomacy and Deceit, which showed that the peoples of former Yugoslavia, although superior liars, are not the only ones with a brutal creed of self-interest. EC leaders weren't fiddling while Sarajevo burned: they were a 12- part wind section trying to sight-read Stockhausen while Sarajevo burned.

It was this hand-wringing that Maggie O'Kane challenged in Frontline. She looks pale after two years in Bosnia, and her body is taut with disbelief. You understood why after an interview with one warlord, who smiled when she said she couldn't stomach his attacks on civilians: 'I can't help you with your stomach, I'm not a doctor.' O'Kane made a powerful case against the West's what-d'you-expect-they're-all-crazy-bastards line. She placed the blame on just the one crazy bastard, Slobodan Milosevic. Judging by her evidence, he deserves to be hanged high above most of the horned heads in Europe's bestiary, no small achievement as we saw in The Roots of War, a shattering account of Balkan history. It taught you much more than the MTV-style Essential Guide which looked ravishing - like a molten Book of Hours - but whose fear of being boring had led to an outbreak of computer graphics that brought chaos where before there had only been confusion.

Two programmes will long remain in the mind: Clive Gordon's The Unforgiving played off the hardened faces of Bosnia's citizens against her mournful, drizzled hills. It made you understand how hatred might have a longer memory than love. Most affecting of all was A Sarajevo Diary, kept by Bill Tribe, the English academic who has worked in the city for 26 years and loves its broad, tolerant boulevards. Sarajevo, Tribe explained, was not tribal: Serbs marry Croats, Croats Muslims. Before the war, the authorities had tried to get citizens to define themselves in a census, the better to split them up. Many refused, volunteering suitable Alice-in-Wonderland responses to this shrinking world. Nationality: Lampshade; Religion: Tablecloth.

At night Tribe, a worried Bob Peck figure, sat inside playing cards by candlelight, while outside a bright necklace of shells threaded through the sky. 'I ask again, what kind of people would do this - university professors, that's who.' Tribe had once been treated for depression by Radovan Karadzic, who was now broadening his operation and plunging an entire nation into gloom. Karadzic and other colleagues had fled to oversee the destruction of their city, including the incendiary bombing of Sarajevo's magnificent library. Watching the books flake in the fire like gold leaf, you realised there was a more terrifying prospect than Conan the barbarian: Conan the librarian. After weeks of press sniping about mindless entertainment, Channel 4 had come up with the best possible response: mindmore entertainment.

Four episodes of Frank Stubbs Promotes (ITV) have confirmed it as an exceptional series. Frank (Tim Spall) is a ticket tout who has his sights set on the stars, and his feet set in concrete. A doomed dreamer, he is a young Arfur Daley seen through the eyes of Samuel Beckett. Alan Whiting provides a blissful, highly literate script, and the excellent Spall (all bluster and snuffly porcine vulnerability) has terrific support from Trevor Cooper as the laconic Archie and Lesley Sharp as Petra. Petra could usefully be transplanted to the dismal dramatic reconstructions of sexual harassment in Making Advances (BBC 1), where she might give them the benefit of her technique for dealing with Y-

affronts: 'So, I said to 'im, I dunno why you bother with a fly, surely a catflap would be more convenient?'

Another remarkable First Tuesday (ITV) told the story of Henry Wu, sometime Shanghai geology student who in 1960 spoke out against the system and spent the next 19 years Inside China's Gulag - the notorious Laogai which has 2,000 prison camps holding up to 10 million prisoners, many of them dissidents. Now living in California, Wu's fractured English still speaks volumes about the little pieces the Party left his life in: 'So many inmates they pass away, become ashes, nowhere, gone. I very lucky. Survive. But soon or late I also ashes. So, don't waste the time, don't waste the life to do something.'

Not wasting the life, merely putting it in grave jeopardy, Henry and his wife returned to the Gulag, adopted a variety of disguises and filmed what they saw with a hidden camera. One young man said that guards had forbidden him to speak for four years, and even tried to control his breathing. Henry had this crazy democratic idea that if he could film this slavery and get it shown on trivial old television, it might make a difference to people's lives. Well, as Melanie Phillips would say, that's show business.