TELEVISION / BRIEFING: The coal shoulder

Despite last autumn's universal revulsion at Michael Heseltine's scorched earth policy on the mining industry, very few people have any idea about life down a modern British pit. VIEWPOINT 93: IN THE BLACK (10.40pm ITV) goes underground at Calverton Colliery, near Nottingham, one of the mines which rode the tiger's back of the Tory Government and abstained from the 1984 strike. Calverton miners bought into the Thatcherite dream, and dug more coal, more cheaply, so that the pit posted a profit of pounds 7 million in 1992. Their reward was tannoyed down from the surface one afternoon last November: the colliery was to close with the loss of 690 jobs. 'We worked through the strike. Was it worth it?' asks one miner. 'Economically it doesn't make sense at all,' says another, and Chris Curling's film gives the lie to the Government alibi that the pits are being closed on purely economic grounds. Conservative defeat in 1974, it seems, is being avenged, and 'the enemy within' shall never rise again.

Last week's attack on a tourist bus further highlighted the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt. A refreshing aspect of Stephen Sackur's ASSIGNMENT (7.45pm BBC2) is that he doesn't just aim to scare with images of Yashmak- clad women and pistol-packing mullahs; he also shows how groups like the Militant Islamic League help Egypt's poor with hospitals and housing.

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