New Tricks (BBC1); Walking With Cavemen (BBC1) Detective Superintendent Sandra Pulman does the worst thing anyone could possibly do in the line of duty.

She doesn't take bribes, falsify evidence or beat up a suspect - she shoots a dog during a botched kidnap rescue.

Her superior notes her "distinctive and enviable career path", adding the proviso: "But you have screwed up."

Her punishment is to take charge of a new squad investigating unsolved crimes and open cases. Not so much UCOC as NUCRAP, according to the sign a waggish colleague pins to her office door.

Even worse, as funding doesn't provide her with any staff she has to employ retired detectives. "Do they have to have their own teeth?" she inquires of her boss.

The scene is set for a clash of old and new - and, the BBC hopes, the basis for a new series if this one-off goes down well. There's certainly plenty of promise as Amanda Redman's Sandra Pulman tries to retain control of her unruly pensioner policemen.

James Bolam's sleuth has conversations with his dead wife, who's buried in the back garden. Alun Armstrong has an encyclopaedic knowledge of cases and a depression problem. And Dennis Waterman is a smoking, drinking, womanising chap with friends in low places.

The fun is seeing them make fools of the New Police where people wanting help are customers, and committees and paperwork rather than policing are the order of the day.

The new unit has been set up for PR purposes more than anything else. But the powers-that-be have reckoned without the dedication of Pulman and her elderly workforce who are determined to make the idea - a bit like Dixon of Dock Green joining CSI - successful.

From one lot of dinosaurs to another in Walking With Cavemen, although the BBC has actually moved on from dinosaurs and beasts to our closest relatives.

This is all very interesting but I could have done without so much of our guide, Professor Robert Winston. See him up a tree, see him camping, see him spying on creature. The programme is supposed to be about cavemen, not about him. It took him nearly five minutes, backed by much dramatic music, to even set the story rolling.

The cavemen and apes are played by actors with lots of prosthetics and hair. All very well done but I just couldn't banish the idea of men running around in monkey suits, no matter how sophisticated and excellent the make-up effects.

By the end of the opener, we had learnt how apes came to walk upright and pave the way for the rest of us. How much is fact and how much made up remains unclear. Scientists have built up a picture from fossil bones and relics, but what we're seeing is, to some degree, speculation.

This was confirmed by Winston when introducing us to our ancestors who lived eight million years ago. "We have never found any fossil evidence of these mysterious apes," he admitted.

Published: 28/03/2003