British Isles - A Natural History (BBC1); Mediums - Talking to the Dead (BBC2): WHAT a fascinating and refreshing opening to a new series.

Alan Titchmarsh, a man usually confined to the back garden, steps out into the open landscape to take a look at nature's bigger picture - opening our eyes to the beauty of the British Isles, all 6,259 of them.

Titchmarsh takes to the Scottish Highlands and the snowy peaks of Ben Nevis for a dramatic opening to a fact-packed programme. No sooner has the camera scanned the white, rocky landscape than the picture switches to one of almost tropical beauty, with the blue-green waters of the Isles of Scilly lapping his feet.

The first five minutes captures the diversity and extremes of our land - a theme that takes us through the rest of the programme.

With superb camera footage and digital trickery, Titchmarsh winds the clock back over hundreds of millions of years, when Britain was just a bed of lava and later a mass of woodland, and throws light on some of the reasons why Britain's wildlife behaves the way it does.

He's not quite on a par with David Attenborough - but it is worth giving him more time. Definitely one to watch next week.

It would come as no surprise if many who tuned in to Mediums - Talking to the Dead, switched off within 20 minutes. Whether mediums can talk to the dead is debatable, but this didn't give the viewer much faith that they can.

Instead, it jumped from psychic to psychic and, almost without exception, their connection with the spiritual world was more predictable than impressive.

This kind of documentary always throws up all kinds of questions but perhaps the most important is whether these people are simply exploiting the living. Like the couple who make frequent trips to a medium in the desperate hope that their dead son will send them a message from "the world beyond". Aspects of this programme were just too unconvincing - a psychic who likes all things glittery and her husband who supplies readings over the Internet.

If anything, people like that only fuel the belief that psychics are simply money-makers tapping into the emotions of those in mourning.

Published: 30/09/2004