TELEVISION / A wimple not a bang: Thomas Sutcliffe reviews Body and Soul

'WHEN you go in twos the devil makes a third,' mutters an old nun early in Body and Soul (ITV). She is perturbed at the obvious closeness between Sister Anna (Kristin Scott Thomas) and the nunnery's resident bubbly novice (every convent is obliged to have at least one since the Second Vatican Council). This threatens to become a 'particular friendship', a species of association forbidden by the rules of the community but absolutely indispensable to any television drama involving nuns, in which the severe unworldliness of the institution must not be allowed to compromise your central character. Here we are expected to recoil from the rigidity of the Priory of our Lady of the Snow, which is emphasised by extracts from the rules ('Do not smell fragrant herbs, fruit or flowers . . . do not touch others or allow yourself to be touched'), but warm to Anna because of her manifest unease within it.

But this isn't just a nun-struggles-with-conscience drama. In a two-for-the-price-of-one deal it looks like we will also be offered innocent-takes-on-the-professionals- and-wins. After Anna's brother is killed in a car accident she is released from the convent to comfort the grieving wife. The dead man was worried about the family firm, a large mill in Bradford, and Anna and the widow soon discover that a struggle for succession is already underway. Can unworldly Anna save the mill from the machinations of the current manager? Is the Pope a Catholic?

This is solid genre stuff - but that's not a mortal sin at this time of night, and the script is a great deal better than you would have any right to expect, giving a little extra spin to many scenes. 'I would prefer it if you didn't eat on the train,' says the Mother Superior as she sends Anna off into the world, as though perdition lay in British Rail sandwiches (she might have a point there, I suppose).

Earlier, Anna and an older nun talk briefly about the redundant pain of celibate menstruation, a short, unspectacular scene which still brought home the nagging persistence of the body in its old ways. Anna's emergence into the world was nicely done too, the ubiquity of sex (on posters and magazines) seen through fresh eyes.

Three people take the credit for the script of Just a Gigolo (ITV), which is slightly surprising. Two is conventional for British sitcoms, and three is still a crowd; perhaps they just gathered after the event, like onlookers at a traffic accident. Tony Slattery plays a battle-scarred teacher who is mistaken for a gigolo at an office party by a sexually rapacious women who turns out to be (I feel embarrassed to be telling you this) his brother's boss's wife. Slattery is funny and milks some deserved laughs with his delivery, but his character has no consistency on which he can build - at one moment he is as sexually panicked as a teenager, at the next he is indulging in a confident sarcastic shtick. Perhaps the three writers just divvied up the scenes between them and didn't worry too much about the joins.