Misty, mewling melodrama

TVReview: Let's face it, when a drama opens with mewling gulls, turbulent watery eddies and sea- splattered camera lenses, you can be guaranteed that you're not sitting down to enjoy a comedy.

RTÉ's new four-part psychological drama, Hide and Seek, shuffled onwards into its second episode this week, laden with more gloomy visual metaphors and soporific mists than a childhood Good Friday.

The drama plays with themes of filicide, buried memory and alienation in a leaky but laboriously insistent script. The action centres on the emotionally fragile Paul (Michael McElhatton), who, in the throes of a major nervous breakdown, abducts his son, Matthew (Tito Long), steals a cruiser on the Shannon and revisits the scene of a childhood trauma, thereby shattering the complacent and convincingly depicted suburban life that he shares with his infinitely patient wife, beauty therapist Emma (Maria Doyle-Kennedy).

And although you wanted to shake Emma for her languid acceptance of her husband's desperately depressed state, his guttural nightmares and nasty bed-wetting habit, and although the endless close-ups of McElhatton's pained visage eventually started to set your teeth on edge, you kind of had to hand it to the actors for surviving the threadbare script at all.

With lines such as "he forgot his scarf, he'll catch his death", this cast needs all the encouragement it can get.

The problem with Hide and Seek is that despite having a hard-working director, a competent cast, good art direction, inventive camerawork and more wind chimes than your average ashram, the script is just not sturdy enough to support four one-hour episodes. It could all have been over by episode two if someone had stayed at home in Dublin to sit by the telephone instead of the entire cast rushing off to Athlone, leaving it to ring out when the poor beleaguered Matthew finally managed to call his ma. A trivial observation maybe, but when the plot is taking longer to unfold than a barefoot trek across the Himalayas carrying your sherpa on your back, these things occur to you.

On a positive note, however, Hide and Seek introduced Tito Long, son of Fair City actor Hilary Reynolds - the 12-year-old is a warm and laid-back presence, whose intuitively easy performance is a million miles away from the self-conscious "naturalism" of so many young thespians.

THE DRAMA DIDN'T end there this week, unfortunately. Admirers of Lynda La Plante were subjected - sorry, treated - to another dose of The Commander, featuring an alarmingly motionless Amanda Burton as the highly popular but wildly unconvincing VIP policewoman.

This time Burton managed not to stretch her facial muscles, even though her teenage goddaughter was found hanging out of the rafters in a salt mine, upside down and quite dead (35 stab wounds and slashes), being cradled in the arms of an escaped psychiatric patient called Reginald, who thought he was a fruit bat.

Well, fiddle-di-dee, Commander Blake, whatever you do, don't let it smudge your mascara.

Anyway, everything seemed to be getting wrapped up nice and quick: fruit bat (too barmy to stand trial) dispatched back to fruitcakeville, girl blueing on the slab, Blake (not given to excess) blinking poignantly, case closed. Next thing, however, a big Dutch detective comes striding into HQ with a caseload of similar homicides, various plastic bags and a change of underwear, insisting that the killer has yet to be found. I knew he was right because we were 12 minutes into a 90-minute episode and I couldn't see Burton filling the next 78 with her party piece.

Detective Count Eric van Outen (Yorick van Wageningen), despite his blue-blooded antecedents, didn't seem to have a great credit rating. In fact, he was totally skint, so after a little brinkmanship (the tedium of which would make your eyes water), he went to stay with Blake in her pristine flat with the exposed brickwork and shining utensils. In an exhaustingly familiar scenario he demonstrated his manly cooking skills all over her squeaky-clean hob, cheroot dangling from his expectant mouth, while Blake uncorked the moist Chablis and then . . . the phone rang. "We have another one, chief." After this week's mild pornography of the young blonde corpse on the autopsy table, we are faced with the unedifying prospect of a wrinkled old blonde being slapped around by the suspect in episode two. The Commander, with its familiar cup of misogyny, brutality and inter- departmental flirtations and deceits, continues next week.

BBC2 APPEARED TO be offering something a little out of the ordinary this week with Pinochet in Suburbia, a drama- documentary constructed with the help of some of those intimately involved in former Chilean dictator General Pinochet's 502-day house arrest in a London suburb in 1998. Derek Jacobi played the vociferous and unrepentant Pinochet ("I was a dictator in the Roman sense, a leader") and Anna Massey played his friend and admirer, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher to Pinochet: "How are you coping?" Pinochet: "Like a soldier." Thatcher: "Splendid!" During Pinochet's 17 years in power in Chile, more than 3,000 people were executed (or "disappeared") and countless others were imprisoned, tortured or exiled. The drama focused on the Labour government's efforts to have Pinochet extradited to Spain to face charges relating to the deaths of Spanish citizens. While Pinochet's lawyers battled to free him, the mass murderer and torturer shared a luxurious mansion with a handful of burly policemen on a leafy Surrey estate known locally as "Hollywood on Thames", home to the likes of Russ Abbot and Bruce Forsyth.

There was a strange unevenness about Pinochet in Suburbia, with surreal depictions of Pinochet's dreams, somewhat caricatured performances from Massey and Jacobi, and a kind of innocent over-earnestness from the actors playing the families of Pinochet's victims. It was at times difficult to feel engaged in a story that really should have been compelling.

The attempt of the British home secretary at the time, Jack Straw, to have Pinochet face his accusers ultimately failed, opposed not only by the British law lords but by the Chilean authorities and "that German cardinal in the Vatican". Pinochet was eventually repatriated to Chile, where, shockingly, he remains a free man.

WE'VE GOT A new TV station. Channel 6 kicked off on Thursday, warning the bon viveurs among us that "if you choose to go out you may regret your decision", such was its confidence in its line-up. Among a lot of cop and doc re-runs, the station promises two new music shows, a film review programme and a chat show with an original format (On ice, maybe? In the sauna?).

Channel 6 has also managed to nab House, the award-winning medical drama series, featuring Hugh Laurie as the recalcitrant Dr Gregory House. House, partially disabled by a stroke, has little or no tolerance for homo sapiens in general, preferring the company of tabloid journalism and daytime TV medical dramas. He is also head of diagnostic medicine at a squeaky-clean American hospital (without an over-subscribed trolley in sight), where he and his very pretty team of medics investigate unusual cases. In this week's pilot episode, a crisply lovely young kindergarten teacher got lambasted by a tapeworm.

If it all sounds a bit too visceral and predictably mawkish, it's actually not. Laurie gets to invert his role as benign father of the irritating mouse, Stuart Little, and instead spews cynicism and invective and his own paranoiac philosophy in well-modulated East Coast tones. "I hired you because you were pretty," he tells one of his highly proficient team. "It's like having a nice piece of art in the lobby."

Anyway, back to tapeworms. There's one or two things you might like to know: you get them from eating uncooked pork, they like to secrete themselves in thigh muscle, and they can burrow into your brain and make you squeak likea prairie dog. You have been warned. House is a sharp choice for the new channel; it will be interesting to see if their home-grown programming fares as well.