Something out of nothing

Shakespeare plays dragged into the modern day are nothing new, but setting Much Ado About Nothing (BBC1, Sunday, 8.30pm) in a regional television station was original.

And because it was based in the South, with references to the likes of Weymouth and Newton Abbot and plenty of cute coastal location shots it was even more enjoyable.

The leading actors helped, too. Damian Lewis was Fred Dinenage (or Benedick, if you Will) and Cutting It's Sarah Parish played Debbie Thrower (or Beatrice), the cosy double act fronting the station's peak teatime show.

Billie Piper, who can do no wrong these days, was the sweet-natured weathergirl Hero and Tom Ellis her dashing beau, Claude.

Lewis, who has single-handedly made being ginger cool, is a class act - powerful as Major Richard Winters in Band Of Brothers and annoyingly offish as Soames in the Forsyte Saga - and his goateed, smarmy Benedick was lovely. Parish, always a safe bet as the feisty bint with a hidden soft centre role was a likeable Beatrice.

And together they were spot on as the cynical, competitive and constantly bickering anchor "men" who secretly fancied the pants off one another.

Piper and Ellis were ideal as the nave young lovers, who try to get married but are thwarted at every turn.

Shakespeare's original work was fairly well disguised, but there was enough of the gist of it to allow even the biggest philistine to feel they'd experienced a little bit of what makes the great man famous.

The script was contemporary, but among the quotes sneaked in was a version of "O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place" from a furious Beatrice in the church after Hero got ditched at the alter.

Despite being first performed back in 1598, Much Ado, like so many of Shakespeare's plays still works today and some of our current writers should take a leaf out of his book and credit us viewers with some intelligence by injecting more wit, danger and surprise into to their tediously formulaic scripts.

Strong casting continues with Shameless's James McAvoy (Steve) up next week as restaurant owner, Joe Macbeth and later on, Shirley Henderson (the tiny dot of an actress who played Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and Marie Melmotte in The Way We Live Now) is in The Taming Of The Shrew and Johnny Vegas appears as Bottom...

Not Bard at all, methinks!

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

If a show is first aired on Living TV you know it's going to be rubbish, when it stars the ludicrous, diamond-decked spirit medium Derek Acorah, you know the depths of hell will be plumbed.

Derek Acorah's Ghost Towns (Monday, 9pm) is one of the shoddiest and most insulting things on telly.

First there's the preposterous medium himself (and to describe him as medium is being generous), posing as a benevolent ghost buster.

Then there's his sidekick, ex-drug-addict, Daniella Westbrook, who has the cheek to assume that we are all as stupid as she is.

The pair of them visit famously haunted venues claiming to know nothing of their well-documented histories and then feign terror/amazement/anger (delete as required) at ghostly goings-on.

Westbrook wears thick black eye make up to exaggerate her looks of terror on the night vision cameras and Acorah wears a barnet scarier than any of the visitors from beyond the grave.

There's also a camp Scottish bloke who tags along, but I couldn't for the life of me work out why.

This week they were in Faversham where they 'came across' a pub called the Shipwright's Arms and claimed to encounter a tormented seaman (no not the ex-England goalie looking for his ponytail); then they were in a grain store where Acorah did an hilarious impression of the spirit of a man dying painfully in a silo.

But the climax was "Derek's Doorstep Divination" (I kid you not), where they visited the home of a mate (although we were supposed to believe he was a stranger) to tell him the spirits had discovered a potential plumbing problem.

Possibly that the whole show was going down the drain?

Thank heavens then for true heroes.

I had a lump in my throat all the way through The Last Tommy (Tuesday, BBC One, 9pm); it was a combination of sadness and pride as we met the last few surviving soldiers from the First World War.

These unassuming, dignified old men have lived more than 90 years with some of the most horrific memories imaginable and yet, they have enjoyed full, uncomplaining lives with not a whine or a moan about their lot.

In fact, they occasionally raised a smile while recounting their war memories, but more often they would pause, swallow and blink away a tear before continuing with their painful tales.

The saddest story of all was that of the magnificent Alfred Anderson, who survived "going over the top" six times, only to come home, not to a hero's welcome but to be blamed (so very wrongly) for the death of his friend.

"I have been trying to forget about the war my whole life," says the 109-year-old, who was awarded the Legion d'Honeur in 1998 and is the sole remaining witness to the famous 1914 Christmas Day truce in the trenches. "We were supposed to fight the war to end all wars, but war keeps happening."

Powerful stuff.