Call me a cynic, but it is hard to believe that the new series, Top Secret (World, 10pm), is actually going to reveal anything secret at all.
Admittedly, the American secret services have been exposed recently as remarkably inept. The bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, combined with those controversial blastings in Afghanistan and Sudan last year, have added to the impression that the United States intelligence community is rather lacking in common sense.
However, even the dimmest spy should be able to spot when a herd of television cameramen, sound engineers and producers come sweeping into the building.
The first programme starts in the American NSA, an acronym that stands for National Security Agency, although many alternatives spring to mind. Most of the cases the agency spokespeople talk about are lessons in history: code-breaking success stories from World War II and the Vietnam War.
There is something counter-intuitive about the structure of the programme: what is the point in pretending to reveal something, when simultaneously praising the way the NSA has protected its operations from scrutiny over the years? How'd They Do That? (Pearl, 10.45pm) also fails to convince this evening. The show's hosts, Pat and Wendy, are so smooth that usually we believe anything they say, be it an account of breath-taking new surgical techniques or synchronised sky-diving.
Tonight, the most convincing report is the one about a mock Star Trek set-up in the Nevada desert.
