Ugliness tied up in a bow

TVReview:  'Do you know how many curly-haired, effete sycophants there are waiting to replace you?" Welcome to Mode magazine, Manhattan-based fashion glossy and workplace of size-zero harridans with ironed-out, wrinkle-free foreheads and kitten heels sharp enough to disembowel you.

Enter this high-spec journalistic arena the bespectacled young Betty Suarez, with her hirsute upper lip, tram-track braces and penchant for sincerity and jazzy ponchos.

There's Betty dashing across a vast expanse of creamy and chrome office interior, late for her first conference, and there's the highly polished plate-glass wall behind which are seated Mode's entire editorial staff . . . You get the picture.

Ugly Betty, based on a Colombian telenovela, the title of which can be fetchingly, if somewhat loosely, translated as "I am Betty the Ugly", blazed a trail through the US last year, courtesy of producer Salma Hayek and the show's star, America Ferrera. Betty arrived with considerable hype on our side of the tub in early January and she's now proliferating across the schedules with the tenacity of her monobrow.

Ugly Betty is a safe bay if you're after a well-scripted, well-acted comedy drama to while away the winter nights. Counterpointing Betty's workplace and raising the show above the high-farce cartoonery beloved of many American sitcoms are Betty's complex and beguiling Latino family, living in Queens. Father, sister and nephew each battle their own demons with verve, from illness and emigration authorities to cheap hair extensions and gleeful latent homosexuality (as beautifully and, despite his name, delicately played by Mark Indelicato as Betty's nephew, Justin, who, unlike his aunt, can spot a pair of last season's Manolo Blahniks at a hundred paces).

Like the indecently successful Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty has high production values and a top-notch team of writers, who will surely be able to string this duckling-to-swan tale along ad infinitum. With fantastic one-liners (Betty's erstwhile boyfriend: "You're drinking now? You used to get woozy from your astringent"), it is almost as funny as it says on the tin, though the initial geek-in-sleek novelty does inevitably wear thin and credibility is stretched beyond a stomach band when we are asked to believe that the lovely Ferrera is "ugly" because she's wearing a wig and padded tights. A seasoned and slick diversion, nonetheless.

MUSHROOMING IN BETTY'S shadow, one of the less palatable of the January crop is, disappointingly, Trial and Retribution, Lynda La Plante's recurring staple, which stars Irish actor Victoria Smurfit as DCI Róisín Connor, the ballsy cop on the bloodied ITV chopping block, returning in the first of five two-part dramas.

As regular viewers can testify, DCI Connor is no pushover - there is one angry lass underneath that shining ponytail and a heart of steel beats beneath that well-pressed wraparound. You can tell she is fighting hard for respect in a tough world because every second thing she says sounds damn angry. Which is a valid character choice, although why Ms Connor felt so bloody bellicose for the entire double episode remained a mystery (possibly because the latest victim's mother Ajaxed out the evidence?).

Sorry, I'll start at the beginning: pretty, young, academically gifted rich girl is found dead at the bottom of the cellar steps. Obsessive-compulsive mother (who knows that husband is sleeping with office tart) dons rubber gloves at midnight, whips out the Hoover and cleans away the clues (go on, we've all done it). Sun up, enter DCI Connor in an interrogatory strop. With her callous questioning, she reduces victim's stepbrother to urinating basket-case. Yes, you're right, of course the stepbrother did it - sort of.

Despite holding bunches of her pantyhose in his unhappy little fists, he had managed to topple his stepsister down the stairs, where she lay, pretty legs akimbo, until, revived by her low-rent boyfriend, she stumbled in a state of panicked confusion to the cellar door and hurled herself down another staircase. (To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to do it once may be regarded as misfortune, but twice looks like carelessness.) Anyway, after a lot of tight and somewhat humourless policing, the squad arrested the wrong bloke. He got tried and convicted by a jury of walk-on artists, and he went down (as they say).

Trial and Retribution does make some interesting choices, which have set it apart in a busy genre. It is aided by a dizzying amount of split screens, it focuses on the procedural element of policing rather than the whodunnit bits, and, as in real life, mistakes are made. To give the writer and actors credit, there was a moving sub-plot this week, featuring Chief Supt Walker (David Hayman) and his boozy struggle with the realisation that he had failed as a parent to his vulnerable young son.

A skilled and often sensationally good crime writer, La Plante has an arsenal of familiar characters and buckets of fake blood at her disposal, and although the new series may feel a little tedious and over-stretched it will doubtless be enjoyed by many.

A BLACK-AND-WHITE portrait of a brave and idealistic teenage Cathal O'Shannon in an RAF uniform embodied the spirit of a meticulously researched, controversial and challenging Hidden History: Ireland's Nazis, a two-part investigation that concluded this week.

"There are limits to God's love," said the Archbishop of Sarajevo chillingly, referring to European Jews on the eve of the Holocaust.

Having established in the first programme the favourable reception given to extreme right-wing Catholic nationalist movements, such as the Croatian Ustasha, by pockets within the Catholic Church, it went on to outline the attractions of our small, green nation to Nazi collaborators fleeing Europe after the Allied invasion. Ireland, O'Shannon explained, was a desirable destination - a neutral, Catholic State that "if not sympathetic to Nazis was more unsympathetic to communists", and that delicately fudged the issue of war crimes and accountability by means of a vague immigration policy that seemed to favour the oppressors over the victims.

This excavation, employing poignant archive and contributions from historians and survivors across three continents, also looked at the lives established by "Ireland's Nazis" while sojourning in our nascent State. For many of us, Folens was a word we drew faces around on sleepy classroom afternoons, a name forever associated with school textbooks. Albert Folens, who became Ireland's largest educational publisher, was, according to O'Shannon's research, a member of the nationalist Flemish Legion and employed in the Gestapo headquarters in Brussels, an allegation vehemently denied by Folens's widow, who went to court this week in a partially successful bid to get changes made to the programme. While it was difficult to make an assessment on the reliability of the evidence in the case of Folens, cumulatively the programme made a strong argument that post-war Ireland was an environment tolerant to former Nazis.

Also forging successful post-war careers in Ireland were "Hitler's favourite soldier", Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny (who had rescued Mussolini from a mountain top), who was pictured hanging out with the Dublin glitterati and leading political figures; and hotelier Albert Luykx, who was later accused of conspiring with Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney to import arms for the IRA.

Reminding us of the true horror of anti-Semitism and racial intolerance, and allowing desperate ghosts suspended in celluloid to continue to challenge our cultural complacency, the programme's investigation made us confront the thorny question of why Dev and his party were able to harbour men such as Andrija Artukovic (believed to be responsible for the deaths of one million men, women and children in concentration camps) while refusing asylum to Jewish refugees. It pushed the boundaries of the Hidden History strand and made the "dark stain on our history", as he described it, seem disturbingly recent, no matter that a new century already has its meter running.

WELL, WELL, WELL. Reality TV organism Jade Goody - the woman who thought that East Anglia was a foreign country - has caused an international incident between Britain and India by insulting Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, with whom the nonentity celeb is sharing the Celebrity Big Brother house. Even if they hadn't been replayed endlessly over the past few days, the inarticulate sentiments expressed by Goody and her cohorts should have come as no surprise. And anyway, as writer Hari Kunzru pointed out on Newsnight, the entire Big Brother format is based on bullying.

Even Gordon Brown, batting away questions from hungry hacks on a quiet news day, didn't seem surprised that his tour to India had been hijacked by the celebrity inmates of Channel 4's plastic Portakabin.

Hopefully by the time you read this, Goody will have been ejected, sorry, evicted from "the house" by merrily indignant viewers before they order their takeaway samosas. If not, for God's sake, just turn the bloody woman off.