Joey (five)

Captain Scarlet (ITV1)

Arena: Calling Hedy Lamarr (BBC2)

AS executives of TV channel five are said to have paid nearly £500,000 an episode for Friends spin-off Joey, the programme must contain some of the most expensive jokes ever.

There are plenty of them, as aspiring Joey leaves behind his friends from Friends in New York and heads off to find fame and fortune in Los Angeles.

The early signs aren't good - and that's even before he gets there.

"If you want to act, you have to move to Hollywood," Joey tells the cab driver.

"So what are you doing in Dallas?" replies the driver, making his passenger realise he's left the airport during a flight stopover. His sense of direction is as bad as his acting. You can't help wondering how long before jokes about Joey's dimness begin to pale.

The set-up is endearingly old-fashioned - he has a sister and her son as his main supporting cast, plus a house with a view of the Hollywood sign. Well, some of the sign - OLLYWOO, to be precise. The possibilities for jokes are not so much endless as predictable.

Joey opts to appear in a cop show rather than one about male nurses. While the latter becomes the TV hit of the season, his show is cancelled before going on air. "A week ago I was the star of my own show, now I'm the guy who turned down Nurses," he says.

Let's hope that Joey doesn't go the same way, leaving Matt LeBlanc to reflect that he used to star in one of the most successful TV comedies of all time and is now the guy who starred in an inferior spin-off.

What to make of the new Captain Scarlet, sorry Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet. We're not allowed to forget who created him 40 years ago. What's new is that he has no strings, for the series is computer animated.

Scarlet is superhuman - retro-metabolised, if you want the technical term - after the evil Mysterons try to rebuild him into a traitor and fail. His companion Captain Black, though, has gone over to the aliens. "What's happened to him?" Scarlet was asked.

"I don't know but we have to stop him," replied Scarlet.

The other new thing is that this is much more violent than the old Captain Scarlet, what with vicious hand-to-hand combat, people rising from the grave and a finale in which a man in a car is squashed in a crusher.

Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr was one of the biggest movie stars of the 1940s, known as the most beautiful woman in the world. She was the first naked woman on the big screen and had six husbands.

She was also, this programme revealed, an inventor who thought up a secret communications system to guide torpedoes. In the Second World War, she gave it to the navy who didn't know what to do with and sent her off to sell war bonds.

Unfortunately, her son Anthony Loder was allowed to make the film. He works in the telephone business, so we had endless shots of people talking about his mother while on the phone. I longed for her irritating son to go away and let something more qualified tell Lamarr's remarkable story.