Hard-boiled and haunted

TVReview:  James Nesbitt is a versatile actor - advertising a phone book in a rumpled shirt, he's all cuddly bemusement, but tart him up in leather jacket and big moustache and, boy, is he nearly scary.

Murphy's Law, Nesbitt's very own cop show, written for the actor by Northern Irish crime writer Colin Bateman, returned to our screens this week as a frayed and yellowing summer schedule began to drift away on the breeze and the promise of some decent television was discernible in the autumn air.

Bateman's Murphy, the great unshaven undercover officer, smouldering with rage, cocooned within his private grief (he lost his young daughter a couple of series back) and cynically detached from the murderously violent world he inhabits, is a classic cop creation. And for those who can readily accept the rules of this particular genre (and who have three nights to spare to wade through a plot that could double as a wetland for a gaggle of Canadian geese), it was all probably quite enjoyable.

The story (deep breath now) saw Murphy reluctantly leave his senile, elderly mother in the care of his emotionally fragile father and hunt through the mean streets of Leicester (actually, it appeared to have been shot in Dublin's Stoneybatter) for the ex-loyalist paramilitary Johnstone brothers.

One of them, Drew (Liam Cunningham), is now a devout Muslim attempting to live by the Koran despite being up to his oxters in an illegal housing development, while the younger, Billy (a convincingly sociopathic Brian McCardie), runs a grimy lap-dancing club, the Lollipop, which houses a framed portrait of the Queen and a couple of shivering Polish women with too few clothes and too much eye make-up. The rattlebag of current media preoccupations strewn around the script with incautious abandon - from elder care to religious fundamentalism and human trafficking (not to mention the conundrum of what you do with a bunch of dusty old paramilitaries) - felt gleefully, almost sadistically, opportunistic.

But, despite moments of blatant exposition, when the characters were expected to summarise the drowning plot without blinking a cold-blooded eyelid, the dialogue did produce some humorously impudent flashes. Murphy, goading the illiterate Billy, accuses him of spending his time in the Maze getting tattooed and "pumping iron in his little Lycra shorts" while "Republican prisoners were studying politics and philosophy". And Billy, with all the religious tolerance of a dyspeptic Ian Paisley on a rainy 12th of July, suggests that his brother beat off the new Pakistani relations with his prayer mat.

If you like your cops hairy and Napoleonic, your baddies sweaty and misogynistic and their innocent victims wire-whipped and disembowelled, there's sure to be more Murphy where this came from.

'WHENEVER I THINK about it, everything bad that has ever happened to me has involved a black person." Cutting a swathe through predictable drama was the provocative, moving and funny Shoot the Messenger, a one-off BBC drama by 41-year-old black writer Sharon Foster, which has produced a storm of controversy in Britain and has been described as "perfect BNP propaganda" and "the most racist programme in history".

Shoot the Messenger told the story of Joe Pascale, played with almost acrobatic emotional agility by David Oyelowo. Joe is a confident, black, middle-class computer programmer with a social conscience who had retrained as a secondary-school teacher, believing he could make a difference to an educational system that is failing black boys. When he is falsely accused of assaulting Germal, his most difficult and truculent pupil, Joe's life begins to fall apart. After a descent into psychotic episodes and homelessness, Joe is rescued by a committed Christian grandmother and eventually finds and loses a lover before finally confronting his own innate self-loathing and mistrust of his race.

If that all sounds bleak and worthy, well yes, it could have been, in the hands of a lesser writer. Foster, however, waded pacily and with immense humour and great heart into territory that is usually approached in a cautious, awkward dance. Pilloried among sections of the black community for negative stereotyping (including her depiction of single black mothers with clusters of children with unique monikers and different fathers), for showing black women struggling under the tyranny of European ideals of beauty, and for having the balls to suggest that after enduring and surviving hundreds of years of slavery it's time for a reappraisal of the inherent negativity which Foster feels is too often reinforced within the black community itself.

Compellingly fresh in its stylised and theatrical way, this major work by a black British writer, which has already won the prestigious Dennis Potter Award, was certainly challenging but did not leave the acrid aftertaste associated with racism and cheap stereotyping. The furore will doubtless resurface, and hopefully the play will too, so if you missed it, watch it next time.

GUIDING THE STATE towards pluralism, developing social policy and readying the country for inclusion in the European Union were among the achievements that a measured and engaging Garret FitzGerald allowed himself in the first of the series of four interviews that make up FitzGerald at 80. In conversation with John Bowman, FitzGerald recalled an idyllic early childhood with his father, Desmond FitzGerald, first minister for external affairs in the nascent State, and his mother, whom he described as a suffragette, a socialist, a republican and an Ulster Presbyterian. It was within this eclectic household that FitzGerald had his first taste of pluralism, growing up among his father's Southern Catholic family and his mother's Northern unionist relations. Apparently, FitzGerald's mother (most untypically for a Northern Presbyterian) went off gambling in Monte Carlo shortly after her son's birth, to appease her disappointment at not producing the girl she had wished for.

FitzGerald is an entertaining storyteller, from tales of his early days in Aer Lingus (when the company still employed a seamstress to repair the canvas-lined planes) to recollections of a political dinner with Charles Haughey, which found the two men seated either side of FitzGerald's wife, Joan, who happily told Haughey that he may as well use his legendary charm on her as she wasn't going to talk to her husband all night.

Bowman's opening salvo concluded with FitzGerald describing himself as a didact, whose preferred legacy would be to have taught, communicated and fostered change.

"Do you fear death?" Bowman asked FitzGerald who, dressed in pink shirt and tie, looked not only sartorially coordinated but also in rude good health.

"No," replied FitzGerald, before adding pragmatically: "You keep going till you drop." What promises to be a wide-ranging and informative series continues over the next three weeks with interviews by Vincent Browne (party politics), Marian Finucane (social policy) and Martin Mansergh (the North).

SHAKING? DIZZY? FEELING nauseous? You will be. These and other "classic paranormal symptoms" drove the Harris family "to flee their house in terror", only to rush back again with a camera crew, a "paranormal detective", a "paranormal psychologist" and a "rationalist" (who waited outside in a Winnebago). The assembled granite-faced team then set about investigating just what exactly was going bump in the night in the children's bedroom in the Harris family's grim terraced home on a forlorn street in a hapless suburb of an ill-fated town somewhere in the cheerless British midlands.

The ghostbusting reality TV show Haunted Homes was presented by a spectral Alan Rook (wearing what appeared to be somebody else's long black coat) and introduced phantom-evicter Mia Dolan, a lachrymose blonde with a talent for "psychometry" (picking up information from objects, apparently). Haunted Homes is undoubtedly the most ludicrously depressing series you'll encounter this season (or did I say that about something last week?). Cheap and nasty, the first programme had an infrared camera follow the young and gullible Heather Harris, mother of two small children, as she was led around her darkened home by Dolan, all a-jangle with the prospect of celebrity as they sniffed out ghosts in the children's toy cupboard.

"Spirits entered through this portal," Dolan pronounced, clutching her ample bosom and muttering about "energy warps".

"Could this house be a route for spirits into our world?" asked Rook. No, it could not. This gloomy little house, with its dado rail and sonorous carpets, is merely a portal to Dolan getting a psychic-reading slot on a daytime TV couch.

Finally, Heather and her two credulous sisters held hands by candlelight as Dolan coaxed the spirit down the stairs and showed him the door.

"His name was Jack . . . I see butcher's hooks," Dolan breathed as the sisters trembled.

"A sense of calm falls upon the room," came a startling voice from somewhere in the garden - it's Rook, sounding remarkably like a Thunderbird.

Apparently, as the programme finally admitted, 80 per cent of the people who contact Dolan for a spiritual spring-clean turn out to be suffering from dodgy boiler syndrome - but you can't make telly out of that. Or can you? Clunk.