TELEVISION / All work, and low pay

ON Critical Eye (C 4), the comedian Mike Elliott drove round Britain talking to people who don't get paid much. The word 'poverty' cropped up a few times and perhaps shouldn't have. Nobody is disputing that things are tough for postmen in Bridgwater and sock-stitchers in the Potteries, but it's not yet Somalia.

Still, that's not to say the programme lacked a point. In an unnecessarily broad spread of examples, the following workers were revealed to be woefully underpaid: hotel maids, office cleaners, librarians, grave-diggers, people who serve pizzas and, perhaps more surprisingly, miners. It is widely assumed that miners are so lavishly paid they have to ship their wages home in a dumper truck. Evidently this is an illusion furthered by British Coal, who issued the makers of this programme with an offical statement, to the effect that their employees were way too rich to figure in a piece of this nature. In fact, the only miners minting it are those prepared to work overtime. Critical Eye found some miners who thought overtime was immoral in a country in which so many are unemployed: a belief for which, it seemed, they were prepared to pay through the teeth.

Elsewhere, on a factory floor, workers were sorting carrots into bags: the carrot being dangled before them was a measly pounds 83 per week. Upstairs at his desk, the manager offered the opinion that 'the female workforce are better at repetitive work than the male workforce'. Top that for moth-eaten cant. Unfortunately, the camera had cut away to another scene before the manager could go on to explain how women made lousy drivers, too.

Sadly, nobody seems to have put any overtime in on Mike Elliott's script. As a result, his gags were forced to live dangerously close to the poverty line. 'What a load of rubbish,' he honked as the camera showed, yes, a load of rubbish. Next thing, we were off to London. 'After all, it made a fortune for that lad Whittington.' How much per hour was the person writing this tosh getting? Whatever it was, it was too much.

This week's edition of The Essential History of Europe (BBC 2) sent up three loud hurrahs for Holland. These were as follows: they have a lot of different words for 'water'] The police force dates back to the 17th century] You can ice skate for miles] (Winter only]) Among many pointers to the national character, a three-piece Dutch rock group mimed to a song (opening line: 'I was born in a valley of bricks') while shoving each other, pulling faces and being generally unamusing in a field. Positive minded as The Essential History is, it has yet to find a European country with enough vitality to redeem the pop video.