Television - Andrew Billen enjoys the drama of two shows, but not their formats

A mathematician recently proved, writing in the Daily Telegraph, that the dearth of good new tunes could not be explained logically by the stock of possible combinations of notes having run low. Similarly, it cannot be true that the absence of exciting new television formats is due to every workable format having already been invented. But at times (such as last weekend), it can feel that way. Let us pass over Dog Eats Dog (BBC1), in which The Weakest Link meets The Krypton Factor; the parodic-sounding Boot Sale Challenge (London Weekend Television); the reinvention of Blankety Blank as a vehicle for a drag act; and the weird resurrection of Candid Camera as Trigger Happy TV (Channel 4). Examine instead Crime Team and Murder in Mind.

Crime Team, a one-off from Channel 4 (22 April), had the idea of rounding up a private detective, an investigative journalist and a crime writer and getting them to crack a long- forgotten, but long-solved Victorian murder. It was an expensive-looking show, with camera crews following each sleuth and a cavernous base for them to meet in. There were reconstructions of the murders, Six Million Dollar Man-style graphics to differentiate the subjects and, presiding over it all, a real, live QC, Jerome Lynch.

Ever since Granada's Hypotheticals - and before, if you count Robin Day - barristers have proved great TV moderators. Lynch, bald but with a cruel moustache, quickly got up his contestants' noses. Frances Fyfield, the novelist, thought him "extremely competent and rather arrogant". Noel Hogan, an ex-policeman turned investigator, called him "a right barrister". But Lynch bullied them and the journalist Yasmin Pasha into thinking, and also managed somehow to avoid reducing the deaths of four prostitutes in Waterloo, south London, to the level of a game show. "Real lives," he reminded his sleuths. "People are dead." The problem remained, however, that it was a species of game show and, like every whodunnit TV game I have ever seen, the contestants got nowhere fast. Lynch was righteously disparaging of the fact that none of them noticed that a blackmailer knew details of the first poisoning before they had been announced, proving that the blackmailer was either the murderer or his accomplice. When the real murderer was unveiled - with a name and history no one knew - jaws dropped and conspiracy theories were confounded.

Yet even then the game-show element could have been salvaged had Lynch been given a chance to remind us where the team had gone wrong. Instead, the credits came up. The ride had been interesting because the crime was interesting, and the social history that was excavated was fascinating, too (Waterloo was once known as Whoreterloo). But the Big Brother element of the show, the relationships between its stars, never got time to breathe. Nor did the game.

Murder in Mind (Sundays, 9pm, BBC1), a series of seven one-off plays, came accompanied by protestations of seriousness from its creator, Anthony Horowitz, the writer of Poirot and Midsomer Murders. The way he told it, focusing on the murderer rather than the detective was a breakthrough. To honour the novelty, these recognisably human criminals would be played by first-rate actors (later episodes feature Timothy West, Kevin Whately and Keeley Hawes). Yet it is not such an original thought:Columbo always started with and followed the murderers, who would be played by high-ranking guest stars. The difference was that they were drawn out by a very interesting detective. Each week you got a dialogue, not a soliloquy.

For all its high production values and expensive casting, the first episode of Murder in Mind, "Teacher", was little more than a spun-out episode of The Bill disfigured by twists that would shame Tales of the Unexpected. The first was that Poirot (David Suchet) played the murderer, a widowed headmaster who experienced a "moment of madness" with a rent boy, stabbed him by mistake and was then blackmailed by a witness. Suchet looked and felt guilty as hell. His daughter, an angelic-looking nurse played by Gillian Kearney, was having none of it and decided the solution was to bump off his blackmailer. Thus the murder (twist two) was in her mind, not his. But dad ended up (twist three) killing himself anyway.

There was an unappealing portentousness about the way Horowitz strove to extract psychological significance and social realism from his tawdry, novelettish tale. Coky Giedroyc's bleached-out direction was pretentious, too: the dead man turns up in the playground with blood all over his thermal underwear and Suchet is plagued by apparitions of the constabulary in his bedroom. The programme was too short to be Macbeth, yet its solemnity made it seem to go on for ever.

What is interesting, nevertheless, about these two programmes is that, like the monkey which comes so near to hammering out Hamlet's soliloquy but ends up typing "that is the gefunkgyutz", they very nearly worked - which only made their failure more frustrating. Who, at the end of Murder in Mind, would not have preferred a cosy whodunnit with Suchet as the detective? Who, watching to the end of Crime Team, would not have preferred a one-hour documentary? It is a hard thing to say in the age of Bazalgette, but the search for novelty is overvalued. Bring back the pursuit of quality.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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