Television - Andrew Billen finds it hard to believe in the psychic detective

The engaging thing - the only engaging thing - about Keith Charles, the so-called psychic detective featured on ITV's Real Life strand on Wednesday, was that he was so useless. A balding Londoner with a liking for MOR blazers, Keith looked like a cast member from The Bill on a night out - and indeed, he had been a policeman for 30 years. One can only guess how he interacted with the criminal underworld; but in his dealings with the spirit world, he was patronising and didactic, admonishing his ghosts when they gave him duff information. (To a client: "When you drove here, did you put something in your glove compartment?" "No." "Then what is he talking about?")

The Psychic Detective was one of those ITV documentaries that slunk to air under a National Enquirer headline but turned out to be perfectly responsible. David Nath, whose Cutting Edge: Brian's Story I reviewed with cautious admiration back in June (it followed a drunken journalist literally to his end), knew what he thought of Keith, but wanted us to work it out for ourselves. He loaded the dice by locating mediumship where it belongs: in the world of show business. "We treat this very seriously," said Keith in an interview, and the documentary immediately cut to a south-coast music hall rocking with laughter at "The Amazing Keith Charles" and his wit. He informed an old lady in the audience that her dead relatives were worried she wasn't taking all her medicines. When she protested, he said he had no wish to get involved in a family dispute. Soon, however, this cut-price Paul Daniels was replaced by a wishy-washy Aleister Crowley.

"I've a Scottish link here and it's not a very pleasant link, quite honestly. I've got a gentleman who was stabbed to death." This Scottish stabbing, he revealed, had involved - cue amazed gasp - a pub and a block of flats. A name came to him. Was there a Rose - or was it a Roz? - in the audience. (How easily his manager could have heard such a name and accent before the show. How reassuring was Keith's promise that he was too honest to cheat people.) Unfortunately, however, the pub-side killing in which her dad had allegedly played the good Samaritan meant nothing to Rose/Roz - nor to her father, whom she phoned afterwards.

The bogus Scottish murder was the programme's segue to a perfectly real homicide in Buffalo, New York, where local detectives were so desperate that they had enlisted Keith. Keith thought he'd find the body but failed to, although he led the cops to a likely-looking "man 'ole cover". He consoled himself by telling the murdered boy's mother that her son had been in contact with him and "wants me to tell you he is now in heaven". Later, he gave succour to a woman who had miscarried and wanted reassurance that her grandfather was looking after the unborn child. This he was happy to give, once he had blindly found his way through the fantasy's genealogical maze. A seance with Keith is like a game of battleships. He erroneously bombs so much clear water that, in the end, he must find an area in which he can score a hit. He obviously believes his patter helps the bereaved. It may do, but only if you concede that ignorance is bliss.

David Attenborough has spent a career insisting, on the contrary, that knowledge is bliss, and The Blue Planet, which started on Wednesday (BBC1, 9pm) and which he narrates, agreed with him a thousand times over. The opening episode, which took as its structuring device the effect of the sun and moon on the inhabitants of the seas, thrilled the viewer with the immense diversity of nature's strategies for life, but its best sequence involved a death. After decades of propaganda about our friend the peace-loving whale, it was bliss of a rigorous sort to see a pod of 15 killer whales chase a grey whale and her cub for six hours. Eventually exhausted, the cub was killed for nothing more than a taste of its lower jaw and tongue (which must have worked out as a quarter of a mouthful per killer). The mouthless babe sank to the depths and its mother continued her migration northwards. Attenborough said she was "bereft", which was a subtle word to use, because it means simply "deprived" but carries with it connotations of the grief that we have no way of knowing a whale feels. The master does humanise his subjects, but he never crosses the Disney line.

Attenborough's last hurrah will be a monster series on mammals, divided, with due academic diligence, by their diet. The Blue Planet, meanwhile, is the work of Alastair Fothergill, who stepped down as head of the BBC's Natural History Unit in Bristol to make the series, much in the way Attenborough once resigned as the BBC's director of programmes to make films. Fothergill is now seen as his successor. Unlike Attenborough, he will face the populist pressures exerted on him by the BBC's business partner, the Discovery Channel. If he can limit its influence to no more than the self-congratulatory mini-documentaries being run at the end of The Blue Planet boasting about how hard it was to make the series, he will do well. With this opening episode, he has already done very well indeed.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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