The Taming of the Shrew (BBC1)

Joined at the Head: Extraordinary People (five)

KATHERINE is a talented yet waspish politician, Bianca her glamorous model sister. Katherine wants to lead her party, but realises she will have to get married first. Bianca bats away her manager's proposal by saying she will only get married once her sister has done so.

So far, so Shakespeare with a modern twist, but there was precious little else recognisable. Yet if The Taming of the Shrew strayed far from the original - although it was good to see they kept in the cross-dressing so beloved of our national playwright - this reworked version kept the spirit of one of Will's most exuberant comedies. Rufus Sewell and Shirley Henderson - co-stars in Charles II two years ago - played the leads with relish, helped by a script which saw Sewell seducing his Kate in a lift with the line: "There is something really alluring, arousing, about the way you move your lips when you snarl", and Kate's mother, inquiring if her daughter was a lesbian with the coy: "You don't shop around the corner." It was bawdy and played for laughs as all the best productions do, but even the presence of a few lines from the original wasn't fooling anybody. It was all riotous stuff, although it beats me what it had to do with Shakespeare.

Joined at the Head could have been a mawkish, voyeuristic turn, but turned out to be a moving and insightful documentary on what it means to be stuck to your twin.

About one in 100,000 births are conjoined twins, and only a small number of those are joined at the head. The programme followed three sets of twins, each with a very different experience, but what was apparent was that there was rarely a happy outcome. Josie and Teresita Alvarez had surgery to be separated while they were still young, although it was with mixed results. Josie, previously the weaker of the two, recovered well, but Teresita succumbed to an unrelated meningitis virus and was badly brain damaged.

Lori and Dori Schappell have learned to live with their predicament, and at 43 are the oldest living twins conjoined at the head. With Dori suffering from spina bifida, Lori has assumed the "mother" role, and carries her sister around. They have braved the stares to live as normal a life as possible, and as the narrator said: "To watch them move through the never-ending obstacles of life is a lesson in patience, dedication and teamwork." Most poignant of all was the story of Iranian twins Laleh and Laden Bijani. They had made it to their late 20s and both had law degrees, but all they wanted was to be separated. Doctors advised the risk was too great, but no amount of danger would deter them. When the operation to separate them neared completion, surgeons discovered a dangerous bleed. They asked their relatives what to do, and the reply was that the twins would die from grief if they woke up and found they were still joined together. It's a common complaint among twins that they are always seen as part of a unit, but few could have felt so strongly as Laleh and Laden. It took 53 hours of surgery to separate them, but the damage had been done. They died on separate operating tables, 90 minutes apart. They had spent their lives wanting to be apart, but it was only in death they achieved their dream, and who could say if the cost was too great?