TELEVISION / Ewe, what a scorcher]: Jim White watches the start of the new season

IT HAS been a long time, and often we did not know what to do with ourselves during the enforced lay-off. But relief was at hand this weekend; we could get our fix at last. One Man And His Dog (BBC2, Sunday) returned to the television fold.

'This is our sixteenth series,' said a gloomy Phil Drabble, the show's long-time host, standing in front of the last bit of England which has not disappeared under a ring road. 'And it seems like a lifetime ago that we started.'

Fortunately the competing trio of dogs, galloping around the Lake District bothering knots of sheep, did not share Drabble's world-weariness. Some of them were very enthusiastic indeed.

'He's got all of his gates, but he's been having a bit of rough in between,' Ray Ollerenshaw, Drabble's commentating colleague, appeared to be saying as a dog took a gallop at a particularly bolshie sheep. 'Ooh, but that's a good-looking ewe.'

Despite occasional forays into such technical terminology, Ollerenshaw is not a man to shirk from stating the obvious. 'Take time, take time,' you could hear a shepherd yell at his dog at one tricky stage. 'He's telling him to take time,' whispered Ollerenshaw, who is clearly a graduate from the John Motson school of commentary. 'That's 20 out of 20,' he drooled moments later as a dog expertly wheeled its sheep between two gates. 'That's the maximum you can score.'

Ollerenshaw's commentating tics are not the only thing the programme has borrowed from the coverage of other sports. There is, for instance, the 'in-pen camera'. The theory of this unmanned piece of technology is that you can see the sheep entering the pen at the climax of their run in much the same way as you can watch the ball entering the goal on Match of the Day or the stumps keeling over in Australian cricket. Except that sheep, who change direction more frequently than a delivery from Wasim Akram, don't behave as they should. And what you get from the in-pen camera is a view of the sheep deciding not to go into the pen, while Ollerenshaw informs you that 'they've decided not to go into the pen.'

From the opening credits to the closing round-up, Match of the Day (BBC1, Saturday) was a dream. Desmond Lynam, who should have been given a knighthood after his Olympics anchorage and didn't even get a holiday, was back to remind us it had been four years since we last had our regular Saturday night dose of league football. Wisely, despite all the brouhaha of their rivals' coverage, the BBC has not tampered with the programme's wonderful format after its enforced hibernation. Everything was as it used to be: the theme tune, the boring bits edited out and the moments of laughable commentary. 'I don't know what language he's speaking,' offered Barry Davies, as Peter Schmeichel, Manchester United's garishly clad Danish goalkeeper, shrieked at a colleague. Well, Barry, you didn't have to be an expert in lip-reading to have spotted it was Anglo- Saxon. In an otherwise heavenly hour, the only flaw was the programme's script. Surely it can't keep much of its audience if Manchester United lose every week.

The script was not a problem for Video Diaries - Elvis, the Yorkshire Years (BBC2, Saturday), the story of a Presley impressionist on his uppers.

'That's the first disaster, the band want paying,' said Scott Davis, our hero and ersatz King, during one of his frequent brushes with ill-fortune. 'Well, bollocks, they're not getting owt.'

Scott took the standard BBC video camera along for the ride as he tried to rescue his career from a conspiracy of complacent agents, unreliable transport and dead-end bookings. The premise, you might have thought, was that we were being invited to laugh at Scott. Here he was thinking that the film would be his big break while all it would do was humiliate him. In reality, however, he was such an appealing Pelvis you couldn't help rooting for him. What else would you do for a man whose favourite memory of show business was when a fan threw her bra at him.

'And it were still warm when it hit me.'