Pride and prejudice at dinner

In my household, and I'd guess in one or two others, watching it became a game of ''whom do you hate most?'' A tough choice. For all the one-upmanship in their advocacy of birching, and chemical castration, and capital punishment for mad and bad alike, their views were pretty interchangeable, and after a while even their faces started to blur. Which one of them was not voting Tory this time because his wife had met a homeless ex-company director, and he was outraged at the thought of ''an intelligent well-spoken person with nowhere to live''? Was it the same one who wanted to bring back hanging but had never heard of Hanratty? But not the one who thought the ''squeaky-clean'' should be disqualified from politics? And who was it believed ''if you choose to sleep in a doorway that in itself is a freedom''?

Ah yes, that was George, mine host at the Ku Klux Klan Arms, Yorkshire chauvinist and master of the art of silencing women. While the rest of the table were almost pitiful in their inadequacies, George had that ingredient X which turns toe-curling bigotry into a sort of rough charisma. Fittingly, given his preferred ''solution'' to the inconvenient fact of second-generation immigrants, George was the one I decided to shoot.

The Dinner Party was, in its way, a very comforting documentary. It is worth remembering that the uninhibited expression of ignorance and prejudice is not confined to middle-class rural Suffolk - you can find it in downtown Glasgow any night of the week. (Although you won't find the same howling snobbery.) And, tempting as it might be to regard the Framlingham Eight as typical English voters, they were far more freakish than your average gay. But beneath the self-conscious desire to shock was a confidence that they were merely saying the unsayable, not the unthinkable, and that did tell us something about the society they inhabit, a corner of Britain where an estate agent is the voice of liberal conscience - but still votes Tory, of course. So yes, I felt rage, but not at the animals, who couldn't really help themselves, poor dumb creatures. My anger was directed towards the party which has

adulterated its principles to woo them as voters.

For the first 30 minutes of Midsomer Murders: the Killings at Badger's Drift (ITV, Sunday) I was convinced John Nettles was the corpse. However, it was merely a nasty case of Embalmed Actor Syndrome (Ian MacShane is another notable sufferer). Symptoms include a blatantly dyed rug, waterlogged tautness of skin, tangerine tan, and a stiffness not far off rigor mortis. Nettles played DCI Barnaby, the sort of detective who - well, who looks like John Nettles actually. Unless you count an unfeasibly adoring wife as a personality trait, he had no other observable characteristics.

The problem with a summary of the story is that, for those of you lucky enough to have missed the show, it probably sounds almost juicy. A chain of inexplicable murders in a traditional English village inhabited by a Porsche-driving undertaker of uncertain sexual orientation and his nosy neighbour-turned-professional blackmailer mum; a wheelchair-bound local squire; a pocket Darcy (Jonathan Firth, Colin's brother); and, that most traditional of English village murder mystery residents, Emily Mortimer. The first victim was a cycling spinster. All we needed was a reference to warm beer and I could have claimed it as an extended metaphor for Major's Britain.

Sadly, despite dollops of camp, this was nothing so arch. Any similarity with persons living or dead was entirely accidental; any subtlety or characterisation, or contemporary insight, or wit, likewise. The Cracker trickle-down effect, which enlivened crime dramas for two or three halcyon years, seems to have passed, leaving no permanent trace. In the end the blandness of Nettles's performance had some sort of point: he was our representative of suburban normality in contrast to the rural deviants of Badger's Drift and, especially, its incestuous murderers, Mortimer and Firth. But they were just the fall guys. The scriptwriter did it.

Witness: The Polygamists (C4, Tuesday) offered us a glimpse of the strange world of the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days (a sort of Wee Mormons) and the practice of ''celestial plural marriage''. Or perhaps it was not so strange. The men's blunt assertions of rectitude, and the women's endlessly ingenious justifications, rang a bell rather closer to home than Utah; as

did the way the wives responded to blatant injustice by analysing their feelings instead of taking action to end their unhappiness.

Despite all the strenuous denials of carnal motive, it was striking how many of the husbands had lived monogamously for one or even two decades before God instructed them to marry again; under these circumstances it was hard not to suspect them of being worshippers in the True and Living Church of the Male Menopause. Randy (I wouldn't invent a detail like that) had been married to Sam for 20 years before he spent just six hours in Patti's company and returned home to announce that he was taking her, too, to wife. At God's instigation, of course. This made him even more grossly insensitive than Bart, who married two of his five wives within a week.

The women, poker-faced, earnestly examining those feelings, admitted to jealousy and sexual insecurity, and the long hard struggle not to resent another woman under their roof. The men admitted initial pressure to perform between the sheets (the spirit may be willing, the flesh is weak) but not one spoke of the intimate pleasures of cruelty; the secret thrill of favouring one woman at the expense of another; the power to punish, if only in your head. ''God is God and He's a man,'' said Randy, which he seemed to think explained everything.

Mind The Gap: Danger Doyle's Doo (BBC1, Saturday) took a selection of west coast Scottish stereotypes (Runyonesque gangsters, fanatical pigeon-fanciers, hen-pecked losers) and stirred them into a slightly over-egged pudding. Maybe BBC Scotland should ease off the comedy crims for a while. Loved the exploding pigeon, though.