The ghastly without a ghost of a chance

IT WASN'T that Little White Lies (BBC1, Saturday, Sunday) was simply bad. It was bewilderingly, breathtakingly, awe-inspiringly bad. So bad I'm still not certain the entire cast was not playing it for laughs. Let's start with the botched gothic script, which was stagey in the extreme, relying on a succession of ever-more lurid details. All that lightning, rain, and mist, the bloody ghost in the thunderstorm; the cat drowned in the lavatory; the corpse buried in the autumn leaves; the dream sequence in which Tara Fitzgerald licked the gore off the face of her dead husband; her catfight with Cherie Lunghi. Then there was the direction, the borrowing of panicky birds and sawing cellos from the late great Alfred Hitchcock; the pregnant pauses drawing out the brittle dialogue; the disorientating way that no two actions of any single character made sense.

Finally, there were the performances, which paid homage to early twentieth-century German Expressionist cinema. OK, I was being charitable - they were 100% honey-roast ham. Peter Bowles did another of the pinstriped, vaguely-caddish charmers he has been turning in for the past 25 years. Fitzgerald looked stricken and paranoid - which may or may not have been acting. And Lunghi stole the show. She spent the first episode as a cartoon vamp, flashing those red-painted talons and grinding cigarette ends into the cream carpet with an elegantly-stilettoed foot. Come Sunday evening she was a fully-fledged homicidal maniac, and Mad Quite Mad. By the time she had attempted to gas herself and her young daughter in the garage, threatened Fitzgerald with a dinner knife, tried to push her offspring off a top-floor balcony, and murdered her husband with a rock (casually flicking a daud of body tissue off

her fingernail afterwards) it was obvious that she was thoroughly enjoying herself. If only the rest of the cast had been in on the joke.

Swann (BBC2, Sunday) was, in contrast, a model of restraint. A finely-nuanced fable about meaning and muddle, literary production and parasitic academia, and the mix of sentimental reverence and high-handed contempt with which the city regards rural life. Miranda Richardson played Sarah, an American feminist researching the biography of an obscure Canadian poet murdered by her husband. Brenda Fricker played Rose, the local librarian who had befriended Mary Swann and ensured the scraps of verse entrusted to her in a paper bag were published in book form.

Fricker, with her bad perm, candid blue eyes, and gently stolid manner, turned in a touching portrayal of everyday goodness. Here was a woman well-intentioned enough to have copied out Mary Swann's poems, improvising where necessary, after the brown paper bag was accidentally contaminated with fish-mess. And human enough to want to keep her collaboration a secret. Richardson's role was more demanding. She had to start out as a glibly confident media celebrity determined to slot Mary Swann's life into her own ready-made feminist grid, and gradually to convert to the confused but morally superior values of tact and compromise.

Unfortunately, Richardson was far too convincing as the yuppie control-freak who wooed Rose with an entirely cynical simulation of warm-hearted decency. When the change of heart came, and she decided to abandon the biography and keep Rose's secret, we continued to suspect her motives. Essentially the script, adapted from Carol Shield's novel, was less interested in Sarah's apotheosis than in the delicious absurdities inherent in the fetishing of literary talent. Could Mary Swann be a genius, living in the backwoods and reading only potboilers? Certainly. The very improbability of her background made her all the more irresistible to the lit crit industry. But could she be a genius if her verses had been amended by a small-town librarian, a woman less romantically primitive and still inconveniently alive? No. In which case the poems were worthless. However, when Sarah's vengeful lover destroyed

every extant copy of Mary Swann's work, the academics were forced to rely on Rose's memory to produce a record of verses. And this time, the librarian's intervention guaranteed her dead friend's literary immortality.

Heartburn Hotel (BBC1, Monday) is written by newcomer Steve Glover and John Only Fools and Horses Sullivan - (who is responsible for the drably execrable Roger Roger). Bravely (or foolishly) invoking the spectre of Fawlty Towers, the setting is a Birmingham hotel, a palace of naff complete with Bucks Fizz on the jukebox, a ''Torville and Dean Lounge'', lashings of ornamental wrought-ironwork and timber-grain Formica, and one too many jokes about the revolting properties of the traditional English breakfast.

Where Fawlty Towers catered for the conventional guests who often turned out to be mad, the Olympic Hotel (named in the misguided belief that Birmingham would be hosting the 1992 Games) has a certifiably insane and multifariously dysfunctional clientele whose bills are paid by the DSS. You can see how it might work: the grimness of the situation is meant to give the gags a desperate hilarity. But Heartburn Hotel cannot quite decide whether it is going for black comedy or pathos. The characters are neither grotesque nor fantastical enough to overcome the bleakness of the situation, so there ain't many laughs, but - so far at least -

no-one is sufficiently subtly drawn to make us cry.

Harry and Duggie display the sort of temperamental polarity we have seen too many times before. Hotel-manager Harry (Tim Healy) is a philistine tinpot Tory, his pomposity regularly pricked by Duggie (Clive Russell), the hotel's longest-staying guest - a Guardian-reading, unhappily-celibate teacher whose gambling debts led to his house being repossessed. These two served in the Falklands together, Duggie in the front line, Harry in the catering corps. (''I fought for my country - you cooked for your country,'' was one of the first episode's better lines.) No contest as to which is the more interesting character. So why has Russell, an actor of uncommon versatility, been set up to serve as midwife to Healy's punchlines? Once in a while he gets to deliver a sarcasm of his own, but even Russell can't raise a smile with a line like: ''You've got the cultured sensitivity of a broken Guinness bottle.''

Sex sells, they say: a message clearly taken to heart by the producers of the religious magazine programme, Holy Smoke! (ITV, Sunday). The amply-endowed presenter Anna Richardson appeared on an equally-pneumatic sofa to promise us ''the perfectly heavenly excuse to assume the missionary position and bare your beliefs''. There followed a vox pop on recreational sex, a monologue from a trendy vicar, a report on planning your own funeral, an interview with a Muslim rap group, a look at the semi-pornographic paintings produced by a retired Anglican priest in protest at the ordination of women, and a talk on Buddhism by page three model Melinda Messenger (she doesn't chant or meditate but she walks a lot). One or two of these items were almost interesting, most of them were not; all were presented with a juvenile, acid-tinted, tabloid-punning poppiness. As an unbeliever, my religious sensibilities

were not offended, but my intelligence was.