Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Derren Brown: Trick of the Mind, C4, Fri

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Five, Sat

Britain’s Cold War Super Weapons, C4, Sun

Buffy the Vampire Slayer proved fangless. The Trades Descriptions Act should bite the hand that wrote this weekend’s episode of schlock. The baddies were merely teen-freaks possessed by the blood-lust of sick hyenas. No laughing matter you’d think - yet *Buffy isn’t anything if it isn’t on the hilarious side of tongue-in-cheek surreality. Thus when the usual bunch of obnoxious, preppy students from Sunnydale High headed off on their outing to the zoo, the hyena quarantine zone was destined to be their target.

Soon the hyenas, yellow-eyed and roaring like Royal Enfield Bullet 500 superbikes, had the kids hexed and blatantly slavering for blood. Even Xander, the regular cutie-pie, wandering into the wild things’ force-field, found himself craving human beef. In no time flat the sleek pack of kids had eaten the principal (after hors d’hoeuvres which consisted of Herbert the razorback pig, the high school’s mascot who found himself tastelessly disembowelled).

Rasher still, (pun completely intended), Buffy attacked the marauding pack, seeming to think that her anti-vampire powers could slay incensed hyena-jerks, while it was obvious that the only effective tactic was to attempt reverse trans-possession. "We need to pull off a reverse trans-possession," said Giles, the teacher who used to do Gold Blend ads, wide awake on a caffeine-high. Thank God it worked, and that Sunnydale High is once more safe for respectable vampires to ply their bites and keep the blood count down where it should be. Buffy - know your limitations!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer amuses and entertains without necessarily switching on that part of the brain which governs reason. Derren Brown: Trick of the Mind engages the brain in mental gymnastics while also attempting to keep us agog. "This programme uses magic, suggestion, psychology and showmanship. I achieve the results you’ll see through using a mixture of those techniques. At no point are actors or stooges used..." No, merely the vulnerable, unsuspecting public, here parading on Blackpool prom, relaxed and off-guard as Mr Brown made his beady approach. "Here, hold this," he said, accosting a blank-faced gentleman, handing the bloke a half-filled bottle of what looked like water. "Give me your wallet. And your keys. Now your mobile phone."

Brown’s tone was crisp, matter-of-fact, the victim startled yet unthreatened, duly complied. Interviewed later, he couldn’t say why. But there he was, shambling off as Brown departed with the goods. The camera focussed on the "victim" ever so gingerly making his way, then slowing, turning, staring back at Brown’s determined receding figure. The point of the exercise wasn’t clear. To merely amuse us? (I wasn’t laughing). To act as a caution against the deviousness of patter-merchants and cons? To show-off Brown’s prowess? His powers of suggestion and distraction are undoubted. But might not these antics, if recorded, analysed, copied and properly practiced, be used in the service of petty deceivers with far less innocuous intent?

Intended consequences were everything to the makers of the H-bomb. The point was deterrence. If, as a nation, you possessed the essential technology plus a stockpile of lethal goodies, who would attack you? It was, in a sense, (as with Derren Brown) a trick of the mind, a game of brinkmanship, of psychology and suggestion. On Britain’s Cold War Super Weapons the cost of this strategy was laid bare, as Britain, determined by the end of the Second World War to remain a super power, chased America and Russia in the arms race.

Spending megabucks, successive British governments funded and tested a series of weapons, and built the bombers to deliver them to putative enemy targets. This yielded film that has only recently been released - officially classified "top secret". The pictures were awesome. Shot in colour, they brought us the spectre of the H-bomb dropped in 1957, exploded recklessly in the atmosphere over a distant Pacific island. Paradise lost. The cost of the bomb might have easily saved a million lives - of those who were starving and sick in the poorest, forgotten countries of the world. It might well have improved the lives of Britons still living in poverty. As it was, it almost bankrupted Britain’s economy, whilst the superpowers, still engaged in the only stand-off that really mattered, carried on posturing all the way to the Cuba missile crisis of 1962.

For aircraft buffs and for bomb-spotting nerds, this programme was an incidental, almost nostalgic delight. For those concerned with the global arms race, and with weapons of mass destruction, it offered salutary points upon which to ponder.