Living fast and dying young - Living Dangerously (BBC2) - CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (five)

HUMPHREY Bogart said that dying was the best career move for any young actor. He might have been thinking of James Dean, who died in a car crash, aged 24, after a movie career lasting just 18 months.

Only one of the three films he'd made was actually released before his death. Yet he's become an icon - a symbol of the live fast, die young set. Despite that, tantalisingly little is known about Hollywood's greatest teen rebel.

Living Dangerously attempted to put the record straight, through talking to friends and observers, but the picture remained obstinately unclear. He was homosexual. He was "a normal red-blooded boy interested in sports". He had a terrible temper. He had a love of speed. He was not a womaniser. He dated a succession of starlets. He was reckless. He drank. Take your pick from all those opinions expressed during the course of the documentary.

What is known is that his childhood was restless, rootless and lacking in any kind of emotional security. When he was nine, his mother died. His father put the coffin and young Jimmy on a train to Los Angeles, telling the boy to bury his mother in Indiana.

One friend, actor Martin Landau, maintained Dean wasn't gay. Another claimed the actor had admitted to homosexual affairs. A girlfriend, Betsy Palmer, said they had a relationship and "it was fine", but added: "Nothing would surprise me about Jimmy".

Among speculation about his sex life, there was a reminder of how Alec Guinness predicted his death. In a 1977 interview, Guinness told how Dean had showed him his new silver Porsche car. "Something strange came over me," he recalled. "I said, 'please don't get into that car because if you do, it's now Thursday ten at night, and by next Thursday you will be dead'."

Stranger things have happened in CSI, the number one TV show in the US snatched from under the noses of the other British networks by cheeky little five.

The new series opened with the mysterious death of a poker player who died of a heart attack (or did he?) during a big game. CSI always comes up with a couple of yuk-making scenes. This week, the camera delved into someone's ear as a medic checked out a corpse's eardrum. Then there was some cutting and slicing during an autopsy that would have made Amanda Burton's Silent Witness pathologist come over queasy.

And the conclusion? "Essentially death by chocolate," said the expert. What a way to go, I hear some of you thinking.

STEVE PRATT MEETS DI CAPRIO

7DAYS ON THURSDA