Trial And Retribution (ITV1); Wild At Heart (ITV1): My notes while watching Trial And Retribution include the comment, "Not a bundle of laughs".

For Lynda La Plante's detective series is unrelentingly grim, offering no relief from murder investigation.

While other police shows offer a little light relief to prevent distressed viewers calling the Samaritans, Trial And Retribution offers unrelieved misery.

The atmosphere isn't helped by Victoria Smurfit's DCI Roisin Connor's methods. Her questioning of the grieving family of the victim - a teenage girl pushed down the stairs - is like a Gestapo interrogation.

Several times she has to be reined in by her colleagues. She's like a mad dog straining at the leash, eager to sink her teeth into this seemingly happy family and rip their dark secrets from within them. "No-one has anything but good things to say about the family, but we're going to concentrate on them," she tells her colleagues.

Everyone is a suspect in her eyes, including a 12-year-old boy. "Do you think I enjoy this?" she asks - and the answer, of course, is that you suspect she does get off on being nasty.

Matters aren't helped by the victim's mother, an obsessive compulsive cleaner, who has wiped, scrubbed and vacuumed the house destroying the forensic evidence. Or that the father is having an affair and was missing at the time of the murder, as was the cycling stepson.

Thank goodness for the crime scene pathologist who mocks up the fatal fall using a dummy. "Not exactly CSI is it?" says an observer in the closest the programme comes to a joke.

Fellow detective DCS Michael Walker (David Hayman) has his own problems in the unruly form of a rebellious teenage son whose hobby is torturing swans, smoking marijuana and taking his mother's sleeping pills. I say let Roisin question him. That would put the fear of God into him and make him mend his ways.

But La Plante does know how to write a decent whodunit that grips you sufficiently to make you want to find out what happens in tonight's concluding episode.

In the eyes of many a TV reviewer, a bigger mystery than who pushed Emily down the stairs is why the first series of Wild At Heart achieved - and maintained - such high ratings last year.

I can only attribute it to the attractive scenery. After all the hospital and police shows that crowd our TV screens, a series set under the sun in the wide open spaces of Africa helped people escape from the British winter without the hassle of leaving their armchair.

The drama itself was strictly a painting-by-numbers affair as Stephen Tompkinson's vet moved to Africa with his family to start a new life with the lions. Working on the basis that if it ain't broke don't fix it, the new series offers more of the same.

Vet's wife Amanda Holden is organising weddings in the bush to earn a few quid. "It will be memorable I promise you," she assures the happy couple who want animals in their wedding pictures.

As the beasts are hungry (something to do with a lack of prey animals, as in animals praying they won't be eaten, I presume) guests at the wedding had better watch out. "We have a wedding tomorrow, we can't have lions wandering around eating people," she said, not unreasonably you may feel.