DURING the past two weeks there have been four sex-in-the-broom-cupboard scenes in ER (Pearl, 8.30pm) and Chicago Hope, the two hospital dramas that are currently competing for our hearts and minds. Actually, the sex isn't always in the cupboard. In Chicago Hope recently it was in a brain scan machine, a device which looks like a metal sausage roll.
I mention this not because I am especially concerned with sex in unusual places, but because it seems to represent the dearth of ideas in television drama. ER has taken off like July 4 fireworks in America, but audiences and critics alike do not seem to have applied much thought to it. It looks nice, but underneath the hip dialogue ER is just another invention of men and woman looking after the bottom line.
Three episodes in and storylines are already beginning to return in regurgitated form. This evening's episode, Going Home, features three favourites: patient falls for handsome doctor; nurse under pressure tries suicide; harmless loony with no identification wanders hospital corridors. The loony is played by singer Rosemary Clooney - real-life aunt of series regular George Clooney, who plays Dr Douglas Ross - and can only express herself in song.
Dr Susan Lewis (Sherry Stringfield) is my own surgeon of choice. She makes a risky, but possibly life-saving decision while treating a patient with a bad heart.
IT is a sad fact of life that you cannot pick up a newspaper or magazine these days without seeing mention of the Internet, a worldwide computer network that allows people to talk to each other, a job hitherto handled by the telephone or the letter.
Visions of Heaven and Hell (World, 8.30pm) is a British Channel Four documentary which has the nerve to wonder whether cyberspace is all it is cracked up to be. It uses as an example - Lee Kuan Yew will be pleased about this - the 'technologically advanced but divided society of Singapore'.
The programme features interviews with cyberspacers, mostly people who stand to benefit greatly from the concept, such as Microsoft's Bill Gates, and luddites such as Faith Popcorn, a social trends forecaster who is concerned that the Internet is turning us into feeble-minded computer junkies incapable of independent thought. Technologists are telling us they have the answer, but scientists and philosophers, Stephen Hawking among them, are not so sure.
