A seriously bad cop show but great Chinese take-away.

THE new Martin Kemp vehicle is a ramshackle cop show cobbled together from every other maverick policeman series you care to name. Hence the expression, a load of old cobblers.

"You've given me serious hypertension" and "Don't make this personal" was typical of the dialogue shouted by Kemp and Joe Duttine, as crime-fighting brothers (so they really are brothers-in-law), between chasing villains who'd stolen £30m in bonds from a security van.

The episode looked and sounded like a cross between The Sweeney and The Professionals. Quite frankly, I'd rather watch either of those two again, or watch Graham Norton and Marcel Theroux attempt to discover what life is like in modern day China.

Both encountered problems with the authorities in a country where programme-makers have to apply months in advance with details of where they want to go and who they want to talk to. Government "minders" accompany them everywhere.

In Mao, Graham Norton, the chat show host, was refused permission to film inside a state-sponsored Shanghai sex shop. So he visited a Chinese sex museum instead, where a hand-carved double dildo hanging over the doorway set the tone.

The smut-seeker also struck lucky at a traditional Chinese medicine market where every bit of a reindeer was employed in making you healthy. Antlers were good for your liver and sex life. The animal's tail, foot and penis all have uses. "Everything but Rudolph's red nose," commented Norton.

He also sniffed out that the city "honks to high heaven" with "the whole city smelling like the inside of a council lift". Hardly the sort of thing Judith Chalmers tells you on her holiday programme.

While he brought a naughty humour to his travels, Theroux was serious in his desire to explore the new face of China and see how the new generation was enjoying being freer than ever.

The tour started well enough in Beijing, where billboards urging people to work harder have been replaced by advertisements for designer clothes. He learnt about the emergence of pop music, with the government keen for him to talk to the 17-year-old singer billed as China's answer to Bjork.

They were less keen to allow him free access to the manufacturing area near the Hong Kong border where the other side of the economical miracle is a rise in the vice industry. He had to film a policewoman on the beat rather than go out with the vice patrol as requested. But Theroux gave his minders - three of them by now - the slip to talk to pimp, prostitutes and those spreading the safe sex message.

He was only allowed to film in a government-approved factory, full of happy model employees. Once again, he sneaked off, with a camcorder, to talk to a lawyer who represents and runs a safe house for injured factory workers.

At this point, it all began to go wrong as the authorities got wind of what he was doing. Fearing their tapes would be confiscated, he and the film-makers headed hastily for the border and freedom.

Once they see the documentary, the Chinese are unlikely to invite him back for a return visit.