Why Claudia should dump David

TELEVISION

HE DANGLES upside-down from burning ropes, he can make a scrunched- up Kleenex seem to dance independently up your arm, he claims to have walked right through the Great Wall of China and to be able to fly. Is this any way for a grown man to behave? Supermodel Claudia Schiffer seems to think so. David Copperfield: 15 Years of Magic (BBC1) was presented as an interview between Schiffer and her fanciful fiance, but it was more like the sort of date you wish you could forget. All he did was talk about himself and his 15 years of magic, as if wasting all that time gave his trade some validity. Claudia, parading about in a little black number, looked increasingly dazed. I'd say, dump him.

It's all the old tricks made bigger, noisier and more melodramatic: dishy female accomplices disappeared into boxes; Copperfield himself was cut in half by a giant timber saw; and a train car vanished into thin air. Copperfield likes to cast himself as the conquering hero of his little scenarios, which seem to be based on a misspent youth watching Tarzan, Frankenstein and Spielberg movies. The lighting, puffs of smoke, Copperfield's posturing and the minor explosions come straight out of Michael Jackson videos, but the spectators, no doubt stupefied by the relentless pop music, almost weep with relief and admiration whenever he emerges safely from his bonds.

You don't know exactly how he does the tricks, and you don't care. Modern technology has made such stuff about as suspenseful as watching someone pry open a milk carton. He is followed round the world by minions who carry the sheets, chains, scaffolding and other devices by which he distracts the audience from the banal mechanics of it all. He pretends to suffer, but actually it's all made far too easy for him. When he goes over Niagara Falls in a state-of-the-art barrel, he's winched to safety by helicopter before his hair even gets wet. I could do that.

From his name to his tricks to his unreal girlfriend he's fake. He means to be devilishly handsome, and succeeds in an Anthony Perkins sort of way - he has obviously worked hard on that gaze. But Claudia seems content. She's so onanistically involved with her own legs, which she fondles languorously when seated, she probably doesn't even notice him waffling on about Houdini all the time. "It's a classic of magic ... I've always wanted to do an illusion like that. It's taken me 14 years to find a way." Yeah, yeah.

The golden age of magic tricks is over; what we want now is the truly paranormal, and for this at present we are forced to rely on Michael Aspel, he of countless dud TV shows and now the host of Strange But True (ITV). Standing in an oak-panelled library which is supposed to give him an aura of scepticism and erudition, he spouts confidently: "We shall start as we mean to go on, with ordinary people who find themselves caught up in the extraordinary." What's strange but true is that this programme has been given the go-ahead for a second series.

The programme-makers seem to be struggling with a dearth of the supernatural (aren't we all?). The first half was merely a recap of a previous story on faith-healing. Lorraine Ham managed to cure a few people in the last series. Afterwards she was inundated with a postbag of unreasonable ailments. This being a lively programme full of "dramatic reconstructions" we are shown not only the pile of letters but the postman carrying them. Lorraine selected a few patients, most of whom seemed to be keen on football, and soon had them back on their feet, either by direct or absent healing.

Absent healing was the only way of dealing with the paranormal size of her mailbag. It involves a network of psychic healers across the country meditating three times a day on a variety of patients at once. This seemed a little imprecise. What if they got the names mixed up and meditated on the wrong hernia? Perhaps it could be used for more sinister purposes, too. We should all be meditating on Chirac's downfall three times a day.

In the second part of this programme, we found Ray Bryant pottering about in his greenhouse - just as if life goes on as normal after you discover you were a soldier in the Crimean War during a previous existence. Time for another dramatic reconstruction: of Ray comatose on a couch, being regressed. Then it was back to Michael, who helpfully informed us that current thinking on reincarnation suggests that you're reborn about 50 years after you die. I suppose it depends on the length of the queue.

From men putting on airs to a bunch of British women who long to dance the flamenco. With arched backs and serious expressions, they finger the air above their heads as if kneading an imaginary wodge of dough, a sinuous movement much in contrast with all the stamping going on below. It doesn't seem much to ask, to look fierce and stamp your feet for an hour or so a week.

"Y" Flamenco (BBC2) focused on one of the less probable devotees, a project manager for London Underground who spends her days in a hard hat overseeing construction work on the Jubilee Line. But the jubilation is all going on in her Portakabin where, though plain and plump, she's transformed by some intricate foot-tapping and hand-clicking. Elsewhere, a mother and daughter practise at home, watched blankly by the washing machine. The dance is an end in itself - you need no audience.

And what you look like doesn't matter. Everyone looks proud and sexy when they're doing the flamenco; and the fatter you are the harder you can stamp. Its passions are undefined. The flirtatious strutting and skirt- lifting are not just sexual: sometimes the women, cantering angrily about the floor in their sturdy black shoes, look more like they're beating down the earth over a two-timing lover's grave.

But it all seems so innocent compared to Come Dancing (BBC1), in which plastic-coated monstrosities indulge in a frantic form of attention-seeking, sometimes dubbed the "foxtrot". Spinning round the dance-floor in their ridiculous dresses hemmed with ostrich feathers, the women look like jellyfish on wheels. Each is armed with a fixed and frightening smile, and hair scraped into a tight cone at the back of her head. The man must have to be very sure-footed. Were he to fall he'd be instantly stabbed by those stilettos, smothered by feathers or simply eaten alive.

And what do you do with a dress like that when the Muzak stops? It's not the sort of thing you could throw on to nip down to the shops. At the sight of you, people would think it was about to rain, and the slightest gust of wind would send you into orbit.