Bazaar trick

Imagine waking up at three in the morning to find Derren Brown and a camera crew by your bed. I don't know about you, but I'd probably freak out. Not 20-year-old student Richard. He just rubs his eyes, smiles stupidly and signs the piece of paper that mind-meddling Brown puts in front of him.

This contract, he tells Richard, "allows us to do what we want with you".

No one in their right mind would sign this, but as Richard has volunteered to be a victim of the psychological magician, he's probably not in his right mind.

He has to pick a card. If it says treat, something nice happens. Letting him go back to sleep would be a good idea. If it's trick, Brown promises to do something not-quite-so-nice, but he's not telling him in advance.

When it comes, the trick is pretty spectacular. Richard enters a photo booth in London to have a passport picture taken and is put into a deep sleep by Brown.

Then booth and Richard are flown to Morocco. When he wakes up, he's in a bazaar in Marrakech. Fortunately, Brown has left the student's passport, return flight ticket and money in his pocket.

We don't discover what Richard thinks about the trick. He certainly looks surprised as he emerges into the hustle and bustle of Marrackech street life to ask a shopkeeper, "Where am I?"

The worrying thing is how easy it is for Brown and his team to push an unconscious Richard in a wheelchair through airport check-in and security without any apparent problems. This doesn't say much for airport security. Richard could have been a drugged kidnap victim for all they knew.

For some reason I've never encountered Peep Show before this fourth series. A pity because it's very funny, an offbeat sit-com with David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

Mark (Mitchell) is getting married to a woman he doesn't love and has persuaded him to grow fashionable hair on his face. "I'm a bearded concubine," is his conclusion.

A weekend with Sophie's parents is not an enticing prospect, so he takes best friend Jeremy (Webb) along despite protests that he has important things to do. Mark's wise to that, pointing out that all Jeremy has to look forward to is "a carton of Mars bar milk, a small bag of marijuana and a pirated DVD of Anchorman".

I chuckled at the shooting party that ends with Mark having to finish off a pheasant he's shot by wringing its neck. The head comes off in his hand, with the twitching bird spurting blood everywhere.

Jeremy is being pursued by amorous Penny. He can guess her intentions by the way she gets him to lick jam off her fingers and says "I'm a woman, you're a man, what are you going to do about that?".

The questions being asked in 1970 concerned a Palestinian guerilla group seizing several aircraft in midflight, including the first and last British commercial aircraft to be hijacked.

Three landed on a desert airfield in Jordan. A fourth hijack was thwarted and one of hijackers, Leila Khaled, locked up in a cell in a London police station.

Those aboard the BOAC plane included British schoolchildren. As the Heath government wrestled with releasing Khaled to get the hostages freed, a civil unrest broke out in Jordan. Eight British men were left imprisoned as battles were fought outside.

It's a good story, impressively told in Timewatch by hijackers, hostages and their families. You can't help but think how differently it would all be handled today. Everyone was so much more open in those days, with the media given more access to events, and no one waiting to sell their story to the newspapers.

The British men had few things to pass the time in their small prison room. "We played crib and played crib and played crib. We couldn't go out and play a game of football," one of them recalls.

The food, too, left something to be desired, although the label on the tin assured them that "this meal contains no gristle, bone or hair - for foreign consumption".