How to get even (worse) : Television: THE CRITICS

FACE of the week, at least the one that wouldn't leave you when you closed your eyes, belonged to Michelle Beattie. Emerging from Durham Crown Court on Monday's news, she wore one of those stocking masks that squish the features of armed robbers into a piece of bad fruit. But it was not Michelle who stood accused of GBH. Discovering his wife's adultery, Leslie Beattie poured petrol over her. And, like a growing number of real-life desperadoes, he borrowed the script from afternoon soap: "If I can't have you no one else will either!" The reporter's cliche - "consumed by jealousy" - momentarily flickered back to life as you took in Michelle Beattie's 41 per cent burns. But then, as Revenge (C4, Cutting Edge) showed the same night, the pound of flesh is the cruellest cut of all. Sue Bourne's documentary was timely. Reports of citizens taking the law into their own hands have multiplied since Lorena Bobbitt made the punishment fit the crime. We began with David, the jovial Geordie farmer. After his planning application was rejected for the second time - "Ar thought, enoof's enoof" - David drove his muck-spreader down to the local council offices and showered them with his own blend of natural justice: slurry with a cringe on top.

The dubious idea that the best way to avoid taking any more crap is to dole it out also informed Kathryn's revenge. A soft-spoken lawyer, after she finished trashing her faithless lover's flat Kathryn sprinkled it with oats - the last he would ever get from her. Astonishing how the most barren grudges body forth such pregnant symbolism. Brassy Jean got her hubby to admit he had scratched the seven-year itch by putting prickly powder in his underpants. Her raucous glee made you uneasy: only a person thathigh on hate could relish the sight of their partner's sushied genitals. The film got darker. We met two families who had lost children to drivers with neither licence nor conscience; one father tracked and shot the oaf who had run over his son. You knew how he felt, and so did the jury which acquitted him of attempted murder. Yet his fist salute as he left court merely punched home the point: this was adding to woe instead of diminishing it.

The film was not interested in such nice distinctions. Grumpiness about having your bungalow plans rejected was cheerfully lumped in the same category as wild grief for a child. With its taste for full-frontal confession - an eyeful for an eyeful, as it were - Revenge seemed almost as heartless and unreflective as its subject.

Had they followed farmer David's example, the victims of Bhopal: The Second Tragedy (ITV, Network First) would have buried the pristine HQ of Union Carbide under toxic waste. But, as this numbing film revealed, protesting against the multinational that crippled them is a waste of breath, and people with scorched lungs don't have much of that to spare. Mark Tully, who reported on the disaster in 1984, went back to see what reparation had been made to the 600,000 injured and the families of the 15,000 dead. It was, as he remarked with grim, punning accuracy, "business as usual". Trailing him through offices stacked with unresolved cases was exhausting, although some facts could still wake you up: Union Carbide paid $640m to the Bhopal victims, while Exxon Valdez was fined $5bn for polluting the Alaskan coast (and killing no one). If Bhopal has a moral - and that is definitely the wrong word - it's be a seal, not a Sikh.

Tully is such an old India hand that he has absorbed the flavour of the national character. There is an eager sweetness and courtesy about him that makes for deft, sympathetic interviews. But after legion polite if tense meetings with canting officials, you longed for Pilger to show up with his flame-thrower. Buried, like the claimants, in a mound of bureaucracy, the film's most powerful scene was almost lost. The camera panned along a wall where babies whom gas had snuffed out in the womb were preserved in glass tombs; little drivers still hunched and ready for the race. With its blank, pickled horror, the wall could have been a new Damien Hirst: The Impossibility of Justice in the Mind of the Exploiter, perhaps.

Residents of Brookside (C4) have not, as far as I know, been poisoned and left for dead by a chemical company. But they will, Oscar, they will. Of late, Phil Redmond's Mersey soap has taken on a tragic aspect that leaves Aeschylus looking like Bagpuss.Two sieges is pushing it for the one cul-de-sac, and spare a thought for Patricia Farnham. Pat has been allocated breast cancer and a Down's baby - statistically possible, perhaps, though pretty unlucky within the space of a commercial break.

Redmond has never been afraid to murder his darlings. That ruthlessness has kept the serial refreshed with new blood: but it has also cut the deep vein of continuity that has sustained Coronation Street for 34 years and left occasional viewers wondering where the hell their favourite characters have got to. (Nowadays, they would be under the patio.) For me, things have never been the same since the Grants left. In Sheila Grant, Redmond had a matriarch to hold a blazing candle to Elsie Tanner. Kids, rapists, husbands and evening classes might pass through, but the great She would go on forever. And then she was exiled to Basingstoke. It could not have been more of a shock if the Starship Enterprise had ditched Mr Spock in Cobham.

Sheila's tragic range was missed last week as Brookie went nightly for the climax of the Jordache saga. Only the superb Anna Friel (Beth) is fit for these high emotional hurdles. As the evil Trev is exhumed from the patio, guilty wife Mandy, Beth and the unsuspecting Rachel hide in Ireland with trusty Sinbad. It is damp, there is drizzle, there is dialogue: "I wanted a normal life and what did I get? A husband who sleeps with his daughters and a daughter who sleeps with other women." At last, Rachel learns the terrible truth ("Dad! Dad!"). She hurls her mother to the ground. More drizzle. "How long can we keep this up?" wails Mandy. Till that nice Mr Redmond installs Liverpool's first electric chair for you, love.

Set in a Chicago casualty department, ER (C4) arrived from the US with notices that made it sound unmissable: clangers and MASH. Too good to be true? Too false to be true, as it turned out. The dewy-eyed rookie, the glossy, gorgeous females, the Lothariowith a heart, the black maverick who fearlessly takes on an unfamilar operation and . . . Be my guest; join the dots. ER tells us that, hell, despite it all the battle-scarred docs really believe in what they're doing. A more palatable, but less interesting lesson than that of Cardiac Arrest which suggested that beneath the carapace of uncaring was, hell, uncaring. I will go on watching ER, though, for Anthony Edwards's Dr Greene, a combination of bleary marsupial cuteness and taxed integrity, who does remarkable things to the pulse. Back home, The Thief Takers (ITV) was also sacrificing plausibility for style. A pilot for a series about the Flying Squad involving grasses and robbers, it took serious liberties with our gun laws and speech patterns in an attempt to ape the insouciant sexiness of NYPD Blue. The director Stephen Frears once said that you couldn't set a thriller in England because of the policemen's helmets. But it isn't only the headgear that's plodding here: it don't mean a thing ifthe lingo won't swing.

For really great drama about grasses, turn to David Attenborough's The Private Life of Plants (BBC1). At first, some critics stated confidently that it was dull because there were no animals. The rest of us watched sequences of growth and decay that musthave been centuries in the planning, pausing occasionally to push up our jaws to rejoin our face. According to Attenborough, the oldest man on Earth to deserve the title Boy Wonder, everything green out there is busy figuring what to eat, who to get offwith and how to get more sun on its back before taking in the new Tom Stoppard. Believe me, that is a lot more interesting than most men in London, and could lend a whole new appeal to being a cabbage-patch doll.

In The Social Struggle, we learnt how plants and saplings in thick forest are programmed to seize the day, from each other if necessary. The territorial disputes are slow but certain; basically, life's a beech and then you die because the oak next to youhas been playing a long game. Some plants are less patient: the rattan of South-east Asia, for example, turned out to be a distant cousin of Jeffrey Archer. Blessed with a razor-wire stem, the rattan twists its way 560ft along the host tree making cute little telephone-wire tendrils as it goes to pass on juicy tips to other climbers. Watching this speeded up was to grasp the full meaning of upwardly mobile.

Somehow you always think the Attenborough programme you are watching is the best thing he has ever done. After Life in the Freezer, you knew that Earth had nothing to show more fair. Now here he is again and it's fairer still. Huge credit goes to producer Keith Scholey and the crew for whom up a gum tree is not a tight spot, but a camera position. But it is the presenter who keeps you glued. He proves that it is possible to be a TV scientist without looking and acting like Fungus the Bogeyman. Better still, he shows us that fungus need not look so bad either. In a miraculous time-lapse sequence, assorted fungi gave up their dank, studenty existence and put on their best frocks for reproduction. An inflating cauliflower cheese, milky stalks putting uppale parasols, a priapic profiterole. Once in bloom, the fungi released spores as fine as puffs of smoke. Surely, a well-deserved post-coital cigarette. I have wound this bit back and forth 20 times. Whichever way you look at it the effect's thesame: wow.