Medium (BBC2)

The Man Who Faked His Life (C4)

ALLISON du Bois sees dead people which, to be brutally frank, can ruin your love life. Imagine how it could affect your relationship with your loved one if you kept seeing his father in bed with you.

"Can you stop doing that?," asked her husband as she awoke in a cold sweat from another corpse-ridden nightmare.

Medium began promisingly as Allison (Patricia Arquette) revealed her powers and was taken on to help the local police. The second, disappointing episode found her working on her first case - not a juicy murder but jury nobbling.

Her task was to guess what prospective jurors were thinking and pick the ones who'd find guilty the man in the dock, a necrophiliac killer. You had the bizarre situation of a woman who sees dead people trying to jail a man who has sex with dead people.

If that was weird then the latest true life story in the Psycho series, The Man Who Fakes His Life, was even weirder. This began with multiple murders - a mother and her two young children found dead in a blazing house and her in-laws discovered shot dead at their home.

The link was Jean-Claude Romand, a man who had everything but lived a lie. For 20 years he lived a double life. This was unearthed when police informed his employer, the World Health Organisation (WHO), that he wouldn't be in for work as his family had been killed. As he lay traumatised in a hospital bed, having been pulled from the burning house, it was discovered that no-one at the WHO in Geneva knew him. Neither did hospitals in Paris, where he also claimed to have worked.

His secret life - eventually revealed to his psychiatrist - turned on a single lie he told in 1975 when, unable to face his second year medical exams, he stayed in bed and told everyone he'd passed. His deceit knew no limits. He let everyone think he'd qualified as a doctor.

Every morning he drove off to work and spent time at the WHO building. Realising that frequent travel was part of the job, he took regular trips abroad, going no further than the airport and hotels, where he bought souvenirs for his family. He even took his children to the WHO building and, pointing to it, said, "that's where daddy works".

It's amazing he got away for so long with his secret life, which included a mistress and financial swindles. The only sign of stress was sweating a lot, forcing him to change his shirt twice a day. So if you're married to a man with excessive demands in the laundry department, check up on him.

The Woman In Black, Darlington Civic Theatre

THE Woman In Black has a very scary reputation and has been running for 16 years in the West End of London. But you have to ask yourself, can you be really scared in the familiar surroundings of the good old Civic Theatre? You'd do well to ask the young lady a few seats along from me, who shrieked in genuine terror at the Woman In Black's final appearance onstage. Or the hundreds who let out horrified gasps, followed by embarrassed tittering because they knew it was just a play really.

To have the audience in the palm of his hand is the ultimate accolade for an actor. This play has a cast of just two, both of whom kept us mesmerised, even through the necessary explanatory dialogue at the beginning. Robert Demeger as Arthur Kipps, the storyteller, is fascinating to watch as he moves seamlessly from character to character. Timothy Watson as the performer who is to act out the tale is initially patronising and cynical, but as the play progresses he becomes caught up in the supernatural goings-on.

The set is deceptively simple, with minimal props and clever use of gauze curtains and skilful lighting to take you from backstage at a theatre, into a haunted graveyard and ultimately through the swirling mist to a spooky old house on the deserted salt marshes.

Brilliantly acted, thoroughly entertaining and yes, it really is scary.

* Runs until Saturday. Booking office (01325) 486555

Sue Heath