Review: TV

Into the Blue (ITV) began in the manner of one of those convoluted Round Britain quiz questions. You were offered three flashbacks: London 1950, a black-and-white sequence in which a young boy rescued an abandoned baby from railway tracks; Cambridge 1971, in which a young girl is murdered by a maniac who erupts, balaclava-clad, from the water beside her punt; Dorset 1996, in which the camera closes in on a postcard scene to reveal the seaweed-draped corpse of another young woman. And naturally these three striking vignettes posed a question - what's the connection between these scenes and Rhodes 1997 where we find John Thaw contentedly unwrapping himself from the arms of a woman young enough to be his daughter?

Unravelling the answer was unfortunately going to be nowhere near as taut or involving as the initial question, a possibility which dawned on you as soon as the Rhodes chief of police appeared on the scene. "Take a seat Mr Barnett," he said with the sinister cordiality which is the hallmark of all foreign policemen, "we can do this in English if you prefer... my mother came from Wolverhampton." The line seemed to indicate a certain embarrassment on the part of the scriptwriter, an uneasiness with the hallowed traditions of the exotic-location thriller. After all, Francis Durbridge never fretted about exactly how his foreign characters came by their impeccable English. Here, though, we were offered an explanation - one which triggered off some unhelpful speculations. How exactly had his mother met his father? Had she been happy in Rhodes? Or had the policeman grown up in England and suppressed a Brummy accent on his belated return to the land of his father? The latter account certainly fitted in with his delivery of Greek lines, which were exclaimed in short pithy bursts as if they had been learnt from some police procedural phrase-book.

You didn't need the distraction frankly, being fully occupied keeping up with the plot, in which Harry Barnett, wrongly accused of doing away with his one-night stand, uncovers the dark secret of his friend and patron Alan, an arms-dealing ex-politician. Harry is soon the nexus of a maelstrom of surreptitious activity - as soon as he leaves a room mysterious phone calls are made and wherever he goes there will be someone in the bushes taking photographs of him. The man in the balaclava appears again, posing against the leaping flames of the house in which he believes he has trapped Harry. But when this itchy concealment is peeled from his face, after a final flurry of murder and gunshots, it turns out that it isn't Alan at all, but Alan's old boyfriend, who has left a trail of corpses behind him as he attempts to smooth his lover's path through life. And why should a multi-millionaire arms dealer have shown such protective, filial generosity to Thaw's bankrupt garage dealer? Well, do you remember the baby on the railway line, saved from dismemberment by a heroic schoolboy? I'm afraid so.

In A Great Hatred (C4), Simon Sebag Montefiore explored a back alley of the glorious patriotic struggle for Irish nationhood - and a fetid little passage it was too. Arthur Griffiths, who founded Sinn Fein, was an unreserved anti-semite and the republican's wartime association with Germany went considerably further than the pragmatic principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend. Sebag Montefiore had dragged some ancient fellow travellers out of the wordwork - gnarled old survivors who refused to regret their association with the Nazis - and uncovered evidence that Sinn Fein had assisted the Germans in their raids against Belfast. This was all fascinating stuff but it was a bit difficult to draw any large conclusions about the morality of Sinn Fein now. For one thing, their willingness to see civilians blown to pieces seems quite enough to be going on with. For another, you would be hard pressed to find a single British institution - including the Church of England - that wasn't also blemished by anti-semitism in the years between the wars.