Suspicion (ITV1); The Curse Of Friends Reunited (five); THE mobile phone now has a regular part to play in modern thrillers, with key plot points hinging on a vital call or even a missed call.

Now the role of the e-mail is being felt.

Amanda Redman's Carol in Suspicion was told husband Mark (Adrian Dunbar) was having an affair with his secretary Rebecca. The news was conveyed not through a whispered conversation from a well-wisher or an anonymous letter, but through an e-mail from the mysterious Truth-Teller.

Rather than simply confront Mark after her suspicions were aroused, she chose to get into e-mail conversation with the electronic tittle-tattler. This was not a good idea, with matters being complicated when Carol visited Rebecca's home and found she was in no fit state to have an affair with anyone - she was dead.

Peter Whalley's thriller owed more to Hitchcock's psychological thrillers than the 'vicar did it in the library with an iron bar' school of crime. Comprising two 90-minute episodes - the second is tonight - the story was over-stretched but gave At Home With The Braithwaites star Redman, with dark hair so you knew she was being serious, plenty of opportunity to assume various puzzled expressions.

Others have suffered by logging on to the Friends Reunited website and finding themselves branded as perverts, drug-dealers and vandals. Some have used it as a dating agency to hook up with former boy/girlfriends.

Recalling school, the so-called best days of your lives, resulted in some of the worst days of their lives.

Ray Casling, from Teesside, alerted police to his activities after boasting in his Friends Reunited entry that he was "doing well selling charlie". His mother and brother are determined to prove his innocence - not of drug-dealing but of being stupid enough to boast about his criminal activities on the public site.

Retired teacher Jim Murray was fuming after an ex-pupil posed a note on the site claiming his old French master had been sacked for making rude comments about girls. Murray, aggrieved at being branded a dirty pervert, sued and was awarded £1,200 damages in the small claims court.

Gary Rudd was mentally scarred after being expelled for vandalising a school toilet, which he says he never did. An e-mail from a Friends Reunited member revived horrid memories of the incident. Programme-makers tried to help by taking him back to the scene of the crime he didn't commit, although I'm not sure how sitting in a toilet singing a song (Rudd is a composer) helped him.

As a dating agency, Friends Reunited's record is not good. Some cases are high profile, such as England goalkeeper and married man David James, who began playing away with his long-lost sweetheart after locating her through the website.

The search for one's first love arouses old passions very easily. "I felt like an excited teenager," said a woman on being reunited with her first boyfriend from school.

People use the website as a way of finding their lost youth. But Simon Pownall lost something - his job. His entry contained a sarcastic comment about "working in the drop-dead exciting world of recruitment". His boss read it, decided he wasn't fully committed to the job, and sacked him - in person, rather than by e-mail, I hope.