Drama as exotic as a tea bag

ITV run stings to mark the ad breaks during those "Drama Premieres" that spread like oil slicks across its schedule every Monday night. They feature exotic scenes - a couple dropping petals in to some foreign sun-kissed river; an Arabian night riding on horseback through a desert camp. The promise of adventure, of romance, of fantasy. All delivered to you as you slump on the sofa.

Daddy's Girl ITV, Monday

Flesh and Blood BBC2, Wednesday

The Sopranos Network 2, Tuesday

Witness: The Pact Channel 4, Saturday

Then you return to the drama itself and it has all the exoticism of an old tea bag. The promise of adventure will have been replaced with the predictability of yet another derivative murder thriller. It will be shot on a palette of greyness so that you must squint to make out the characters. The flourish of the sting's jingle will be gone in favour of the death rattle of sub-Morse strings.

You will find a highly paid former-soap star dragging the flaccid script, like a bag of cement through quicksand, to an ending so predictable that you have stayed tuned only for the satisfaction of knowing you had guessed right. And the only sand will be that of some gale-wracked seaside resort in which every story lands somewhere along the line.

This week's offering, Daddy's Girl, was 125 minutes long, and it would been best for all concerned if the cast had kept working on the case during the ad breaks, then come back and given us a quick wrap up of how they solved it while you were putting the kettle on.

Ex-Eastender Martin Kemp played a lone father whose daughter begins to suspect that her mother may not have walked out on the family 10 years ago, but was instead murdered by daddy. Implausibility was heaped upon absurdity, until the widening plot holes eventually brought the whole thing crashing down. Even then, it limped on like a Terminator of pulp TV.

Determined to make it to the twist at the end. Kemp played the father with such wounded innocence that it was obvious from the opening credits that he had to have murdered his wife. I could fill you in on the plot details, but if you use your own imagination it will most likely yield a better result.

They can't all be like Flesh and Blood, I suppose. Here Christopher Eccleston played a man searching for his birth parents only to discover that they were patients in a hospital for the mentally disabled, a scandalous union that had been immediately covered-up. This was original and relevant television, that also managed to be equal parts comic, tender, thoughtful and restrained. It was paced beautifully, and ended on a scene that managed to be both undramatic and satisfying. The presence of two mentally disabled actors as his parents added an invaluable layer of realism.

It was BBC2, and part of their What's Your Problem? season of programming on the theme of disability, but there was nothing in Flesh and Blood that proved it would not have worked perfectly well on prime time ITV. But that channel seems to have settled for its role as pulp fiction writer, with the promise of the wondrous on the cover, but a soulless familiarity from the very first line.

They definitely can't all be like The Sopranos. I caught myself watching it on Tuesday night while dishevelled in shorts, T-shirt and dressing gown. Watching Tony Soprano shamble down his driveway in shorts, vest and dressing gown. This is what happens.

You go without the show for a certain amount of time and your body subconsciously mimics Tony by way of compensation.

The fourth series began, as so many of the episodes have, with Tony stooping for his morning paper, casting one eye through the supplements while training another on the watching FBI. But they are nowhere to be seen. They are no longer parked outside his house. He doesn't find them rustling in the trees. They are not peering around the poles at Bada Bing.

The FBI, it turns out, is back-combing its hair, pushing-up its bra, yanking down the mini-skirt and making eyes at Tony.

And Tony is making eyes back. Her name is Danielle, and she is the new best friend to Drea, who is girlfriend of Christopher, who in turn is nephew to Tony. Tony wants to draw Christopher closer to him than any other, speak only through him so as to add a layer of protection between him and justice. It is a simple plan blighted only by how Tony, blinded by its cleavage, has invited the FBI to join him at the family dinner table.

He's also failed to notice Christopher's drug habit, hidden away between his toes where he puts the needle to avoid detection. By the end of this first episode, he had killed a newly retired cop, fingered by Tony as the man who had killed his father as he arrived home to baby Christopher.

"He was bringing home a crib for me," Christopher reminisced.

"Well, TV trays," admitted Tony. "Though, it could just as easily been a crib." It was an episode that planted explosive charges throughout the plot. Nine, 10, maybe more storylines were developed with now traditional sleight of hand. Tony, hit by cash-flow problems, seeks out some recession-proof business. Uncle Junior's trial draws closer. The nurse at the doctor's surgery where he and Tony meet turns out to be another FBI agent disguised as fresh meat. Bobby Bacala becomes Junior's chief despite of - or because of - his intellectual deficit and post-September 11th malaise. "Of course, it was all predicted by Quasimodo." There's the increasingly bitter Paulie Walnuts now languishing in jail on a weapons rap. And this week Ralphie and Janice consummated their axis of evil in Tony's bathroom. The last wiseguy to mess around with Janice, remember, ended up in bite-size chunks.

David Chase claims that the series will end after five seasons, which makes this the penultimate one. If ever things were going to get very nasty indeed, it is now. "Everything comes to an end," prophesied Carmela. And every end needs to start somewhere. The charges are set. All it needs is for someone to press the wrong button.

The Pact traced the tragedy of the four Mulrooney women - three sisters and their aunt - found dead in a suburban estate in Leixlip two years ago. It was the kind of estate that scars the nostalgia of the Celtic Tiger. Indistinguishable houses. No shops. No personality. The absurd title of Cyber Plains.

On March 31st, 2000, two of the women left their house and journeyed into the city. There, they paid their gas bill, added £100 in credit. Then they visited St Stephen's Green shopping centre before returning by taxi, and closing the door for the last time.

Through April they began to destroy any evidence they could of their existence. Soaking documents and rolling them into balls of papier mâché. They pushed the fridge up against the front door, a chair and table against the back. They sealed the letterbox and the windows and turned the heat on full. Then, sometime in May, the four put down the cutlery on their last meals, and never ate again. Only the water spread about the house in bowls and pots would pass their lips.

They died one by one, over between 30 to 60 days. First 82-year-old Aunt Frances died. Then 51-year-old Ruth-Bridget.

Then her younger sister Josephine, and finally Ruth's twin Catherine. Three bodies were found in the sitting room, almost as if they had been laid out. The fourth found slumped on the bin bags in the kitchen, as if death had suddenly interrupted her cleaning routine. The mental strength needed to see this through, as Dr Marie Cassidy remarked, leaves you speechless.

The atmosphere in The Pact was spread thick. Disembodied phone tones, screaming alarms, onrushing noises rattled their way through the film. Grotesque close-ups of the kitsch iconography of Catholicism filled the narrative gaps. As if the story needed propping up. It posed questions but had few answers. Its witnesses were local shopkeepers, postmasters, old school friends. People on whom the Mulrooney lives had only briefly snagged. There were pictures of the women, some of which seemed quite contemporary. The Pact didnot explain where these came from.

The lives of the three sisters, it would seem, had been ones of ignorant acquiescence. To their aunt, who raised them alongside their parents, before the three left with her and eventually adopted her name. To God, to whom they expected their souls to ascend with great glory as their bodies slipped away beneath them. They had lived lives several degrees removed from the people outside the house. Sometimes, said a neighbour from their previous home in Sandymount, the curtain would be slightly opened, and you would hear country and western music from within.

Ruth chronicled their final weeks, through increasingly desperate, but lucid letters to Josephine and to people she had not seen for a decade, but in tones which suggested deep intimacy. She wrote: "No-one should be so alone in this world. It is so bleak and lonesome." Such words for one who had hardly ever stepped out into it.