How Art Made The World (BBC2); New Tricks (BBC1): DR Nigel Spivey asks a lot of big questions in How Art Made The World. "What if we couldn't understand images?", "How do you come up with the idea in the first place?" and a short, but sweet "But why?".

Halfway through the programme I felt like putting my hand over his mouth and telling to stop with the questions and give us some answers.

Admittedly, it wasn't an easy subject to grasp, especially for a TV reviewer made weary by celebrity TV reality show overload. The Day Pictures Were Born grappled with the idea of how the human race came to get the meaning of images.

Looking and understanding is something we do hundreds of times a day without really thinking about it, whether it's identifying the male/female illustrations over a toilet door or just looking at pictures. We see lines and can give them meaning, we tell one shape from another, and we understand that an arrangement of colours means something.

Hard to imagine that at some point in the past, life was imageless. This is a difficult concept to grasp, even for the experts who didn't really get to grips with the possibilities for ages.

The search for answers took Spivey around the world to view paintings in caves and on rock walls. In South Africa he attended a "trance dance" where a shaman fell into an unconscious state in which he died and visited the spiritual world.

Spivey himself put on goggles with flashing lights and entered an altered state himself. I find watching episodes of Footballers' Wives has the same effect.

A few years ago Professor David Lewis Williams put forward a new theory. Rather than depicting figures from real life, the cave and rock paintings were memories culled from people's unconscious. The pictures were what they saw in their trances. They were recreating their hallucinatory encounters with animals by painting them on to the rock face.

Spivey ended with one final question: what would our ancestors have made of images that move and can be beamed across the world? They might quite like New Tricks. This sounds like a drama series dreamt up by committee - a feisty female detective is put in charge of a team of pensioner policemen to investigate unsolved cases. In reality, it's good fun thanks to the casting and, last night at least, a sharp script.

The case revolved around an Asian woman attacked on a canal towpath and left for dead. She'd been on life support in hospital for eight years.

Amanda Redman's top cop spent much of the episode eating curry (for reasons too complicated to explain), while her elderly colleagues suffered the repercussions of spicy food and indulging in horseplay involving the swear box.

They were joined on the case by an Asian policeman named Pushkar. "It's Hindi for Skoda," he told them.

Published: 17/05/2005