Last Night's Television - Imagine..., BBC1; Horizon, BBC2; Man Hunters: Sex Trips for Girls, Channel 4

Louder than bombs

Firas glanced at the cover of the Iron Maiden album in his hand and chuckled darkly. "This is what life looks like here," he said, holding the CD out to the camera, "Death on the Road, dude." The image was typical of the graphical restraint and delicacy we have come to associate with heavy-metal music: an old-fashioned hearse pulled by two red-eyed horses, driven by a gaunt figure of death and liberally decorated with fluttering entrails, skulls and gouts of livid flame. And Firas's point was that the gap between this lurid fantasy and daily life in Baghdad wasn't nearly wide enough for comfort. As another member of Firas's band, Acrassicauda, put it, "We are living in a heavy-metal world." Occasionally, in the background, you could hear chunks of the heavy metal flying around, in the clatter of machine-gun fire or the sudden slammed door of a car bomb. Firas and his mates have developed a fine ear for this kind of percussion. "Nah, it's a mortar not a car bomb," one of them said insouciantly, after a distant crump had interrupted an interview.

Sadly for Acrassicauda, living in a heavy-metal world does not make things easy for a heavy-metal band. They had, rather touchingly, rustled together a small group of Baghdad headbangers for an afternoon concert in a heavily fortified hotel, five or six of whom gamely tried to get a mosh pit going on a narrow square of sunlit parquet floor. Under Saddam, headbanging had been banned because of its visual similarity to the davening of religious Jews, but Acrassicauda had been allowed to play provided they included at least one song in praise of the great leader. Under the insurgency, things had tightened up considerably. An American missile appeared to have destroyed the band's only rehearsal space and death threats had been posted against all singers and musicians, never mind those musicians who love the riffs of the Great Satan.

Imagine...'s "Heavy Metal in Baghdad" was an expanded version of an independently made documentary, replaying some of the original film and then following the story further on, to see what had happened next. Surprisingly, even to the band members themselves, everyone was still alive, though they'd been forced to flee Iraq, first to Damascus (which turned out to have an even smaller heavy-metal scene than Baghdad) and then to Turkey. There Acrassicauda had learnt the painful truth that while an Iraqi heavy-metal band makes a great novelty item for the evening news, durable, rent-paying fame is a good deal more elusive. Unfortunately, having been widely profiled in the Turkish press, it's now impossible for them to go back to Baghdad, since the publicity will have rocketed them to the top of the insurgents' hit list. It was a melancholy, touching film, thickened into something more than an oddity by the fact that heavy metal's overblown rhetoric had come up against circumstances that, for once, justified its adolescent grandstanding.

You might think that a programme that sets out to answer one simple question but concludes, 60 minutes later, that there isn't an answer, and even if there was, we probably wouldn't understand it, might feel like a failure. But Horizon's "Do You Know What Time It Is?" was a cerebral treat. Its presenter, Professor Brian Cox, has already had a crack at explaining gravity, and here he tackled time, talking to physicists and astronomers about hard facts and virtually ungraspable theory. The answer to the question varies, it seems. It's "13.7 billion years" if you're curious about how long our universal clock's been ticking. And its "time to go for lunch" if you're a physicist with a sense of humour. Best thing to look at was an extreme slow-motion shot of Cox shaking his head like a dog, which revealed that his face flapped and wobbled like boiled tripe in a hurricane. Best fact to take to the playground was Planck time, a unit that can roughly be described, Cox explained, as "a million million million million million million millionth and a little bit more of a second". I loved the "little bit more".

Man Hunters: Sex Trips for Girls introduced us to Barbara and Joanne, women of a certain age who had acquired something of an addiction to holidays in the Dominican Republic, after discovering that its handsome young men stick to elderly foreign women like burrs. The title was a tiny bit misleading, even though it was clear that sex was part of the deal, because what Barbara and Joanne really appeared to crave was the illusion of love itself. "He's just besotted... he's just the perfect gentleman... I can't help feeling that this one's genuine," said Barbara, of a man who either had a real fetish for Bet Lynch bottle-blonde grandmothers, or was doing a good job of pretending. Deep down, Barbara and Joanne knew exactly what was going on, but did a good job of pretending they didn't.