David Behrens: Pick of the Week's TV

Back in the Sixties, they decided to make a batch of new Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Trouble was, they didn't hire the original animators - so the result was that Tom and Jerry looked as if they were being played by different animals.

Oddly, the latest TV adaptation of an Armistead Maupin novel induces much the same effect.

Maupin is the San Francisco writer whose first account of indigenous Seventies lifestyles caused a minor sensation on its British screening five years ago.

Tales of the City was a marvellously-realised piece of soap. The sex lives of the assorted misfits who inhabited a house on Barbary Lane were interwoven with intrigue and panache, and the period ambience was subtle yet pervasive. It was Peyton Place on the Pacific.

This new series picks up the same threads - but it's taken Channel Four five years to find the money to make it (the original American co-producers pulled out in the midst of a controversy about its morality) and the cast have had better things to do than sit around twiddling their thumbs.

So, only a handful of the original actors remain; for the most part, new performers have been called in, Tom and Jerry-like, to re-create the characters.

This would matter less if the production standards were as high as those of the original - but this sequel is not entirely successful at disguising the fact that the plotting is based almost entirely on audacious coincidence.

Tonight's story begins six weeks after the last one ended. Mrs Madrigal (still played by Olympia Dukakis) is mourning the death of her true love Edgar Halcyon, while Mona has taken off to Nevada to work as a receptionist in a brothel.

Those who have read Maupin's cycle of novels will know what she discovers there; the rest of you will be as gobsmacked as when Bobby Ewing stepped out of the shower in Dallas.

"Some people drink to forget; I smoke pot to remember," she says, by way of explanation.

A smattering of new characters include Swoosie Kurtz as Mona's vengeful mother, Betty; and Jackie Burroughs as the whorehouse madam under whose wing Mona nestles.

It is, for those who watched Tales of the City and were expecting more of the same, slightly disappointing - not to mention spectacularly implausible.

All the same, like most serials of its type, it's deliciously more-ish.

Not a Lot of People Know That, Monday, 11pm, BBC1

A few years ago, if you popped into the BBC bar in Birmingham, a tall, gangly chap with big glasses would greet you by pressing his head against yours and saying, "Aaaawooooooo."

The regulars were used to it. "Ignore him," someone told me. "He's the producer of Pebble Mill at One." He was, too.

It was an unusual concept of what constitutes entertainment - but it was not untypical of those in the Pebble Mill building. Who else, for instance, would have considered Telly Addicts worthy of a ten-year run?

Currently, Pebble Mill's producers are inflicting upon us a comedy quiz called Not a Lot of People Know That. This is BBC Midlands' attempt at getting trendy, in its attempt to compete with those in-vogue London-based programmes like They Think It's All Over and Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

But Not a Lot of People Know That has been made in a creative vacuum - the same one which once brought you Good Morning with Anne and Nick. It has, despite its title, nothing to do with Michael Caine. The idea is for the host, Bob Mills, to pose questions on the strange and the bizarre to disparate teams of celebrities. It's a radio show done on camera.

This week, betraying a scarcity of available guests, the Top of the Pops presenter Jamie Theakston - not to my knowledge a noted comedian - has been drafted in to make up the numbers.

It's shows like this which have prompted some in the BBC to wonder why Pebble Mill continues to exist as a producer of network programmes.

The answer? Not a lot of people know that.

Wheeler Dealers, Wednesday, 7pm, BBC1

Back in the Fifties, the newspaper tycoon Lord Thomson described television as a licence to print money. At last, someone has taken him literally.

This new BBC show, slipped into the schedules with scarcely so much as a trailer, takes up a get-rich-quick idea the corporation has oft considered but previously discarded as unprincipled: giving a punter a sum of money and then watching what he does with it.

In this case £1,000 is at stake: a tidy sum in anyone's book but, lest anyone worries about the squandering of licence-payers' resources, a drop in the ocean of a TV production budget.

Two teams of three are entrusted with a grand each and told to turn it into as big a sum as possible, in the space of a week, by dabbling in a given product market. It's one of television's riskier ideas (so far only this pilot programme has been commissioned) but the potential rewards are considerable, for the BBC as well as the contestants.

Given some judicious team selection, we could be on the verge of something unique and compelling here. Would, for instance, a cocky sixth-former make a better fist of playing the stock market than a highly-paid company executive? Could a take-away proprietor from Keighley outmanoeuvre the Forte family in the international catering business? I'd certainly like to see them try.

The age of the entrepreneur is not, it seems, dead. Like everything else, it's just been transferred to television and turned into a game show.

This Wonderful Life, Tuesday, 10.10pm, Channel 5

Here's the antidote to Hello Magazine - a show dedicated to knocking the stars off their perches.

The video equivalent of a hatchet job in the News of the World, This Wonderful Life takes as its subject each week a noted celebrity, and spends an hour picking him or her to pieces.

Liz Hurley (pictured left) is an easy target for programme one. An assortment of film critics are rounded up to ridicule her acting abilities, while various other pundits ponder on what she did to become famous in the first place. An "unauthorised biography" is how Channel Five describes it, and they're not kidding.

It's a mystery, though, why all of this should take an hour when two words are sufficient to sum up Miss Hurley's career to date: Hugh Grant.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.