TELEVISION / Tragic infatuations with ideologies of violence

STATES OF TERROR (BBC 1) was full of echoes - literally, at first, when the soundtrack offered you a sinister aural pun. The policeman who finally tracked down Silke Maier-Witt stood in an armoury and loaded the .45 automatic she had been given as a graduation present by her Red Army Faction comrades. It made that silky, seductive click of closely-machined metal. A few moments later you saw Maier-Witt being escorted from the prison cell where she is serving a five year sentence and the German locks mimicked the sound exactly, bolts sliding home.

The other reverberations were more profound and came later in Stephen Walker's account of how a 'quiet, friendly' schoolgirl (aren't they always) had been transformed into one of Germany's most wanted terrorists. Maier-Witt's early life wasn't exactly routine - her mother died when she was young and her father remarried three times before she was 10 - but there was nothing there to explain why she would plunge into the underground.

It was a matter of timing in the end - her first teenage suspicions about the part her father and stepmother might have played in the war (he was a Nazi party member though she didn't know that) coincided with the radical unrest of the late Sixties, a movement that magnified adolescent sulkiness into an ethical principle. The combination was volatile everywhere but in Germany, where the young had powerful examples of the consequences of standing idly by, it could be lethal. Convinced by the treatment of the Baader-Meinhof gang that Germany was drifting towards state fascism, Maier-Witt moved from Vietnam war protests to direct action.

When her fingerprint was discovered on a grenade launcher aimed at a senior politician's office she graduated to the most wanted list, and was soon being hunted for her part in the kidnapping and murder of the industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer and the attempted assassination of General Alexander Haig. She still has fugitive eyes.

She wasn't really cut out to be a terrorist, lacking a relish for the glamour of spilt blood. Her happiest time, she recalled, was when the group went to Aden to train with Palestinian guerrillas and she was able to spend her time making bread. Her colleagues weren't convinced that batch baking would hasten the inevitable collapse of capitalism and subjected her to group criticism, after which she toed the line. 'I obeyed,' she said when pressed about how she could have squared murder with her conscience. 'I tried to be part of that group at any cost.' Suddenly, there, you could hear a faint echo of her father's generation speaking, explaining their own tragic infatuation with an ideology of violence.

'Canada is full of contradictions,' said one of the rangy presenters of The Rough Guide to the Americas (BBC 2). It would have been nice to hear a Canadian voice saying 'Oh no it isn't' after this travelogue cliche but instead you got The Rough Guide's stock-in-trade, mildly lubricious puns ('Then we puck off to Montreal' promised a presenter standing on an ice- hockey rink) and mildly cheeky descriptions of the country at hand. They had some fun at Canada's expense, pointing out the inferiority complex which leads local guidebooks to churn out superlative statistics (anyone for the world's biggest car-park?) and their nervousness about the Big Neighbour - you may find yourself eating 'Poulet Frit a la Kentucky' in Montreal.

The innuendo gets a bit wearisome sometimes (rickshaw pulling in Toronto is 'the most popular way to earn a quick buck - that's buck, with a b') but The Rough Guide is infinitely preferable to its mainstream competitors like BBC 1's Holiday. Last night's episode included the information that Canada has 300 frisbee golf professionals, that it pays immigrant families to have children and that Toronto makes a tidy sum imitating New York for American film-makers. This is genuinely travel, not tourism.