TODAY'S TELEVISION

There's something weird happening on Saturday evenings on BBC1. It started with Bugs (techno whizz-kids solve hi-tech crimes) and Crime Traveller (time-travelling police couple retroactively solve crimes), and now continues with Jonathan Creek (Sat BBC1), in which a designer of magic tricks and an investigative journalist solve seemingly impossible crimes. Saturday primetime seems to have become the testing ground for the more playful, fantastical end of the home-grown mystery and suspense market. Coincidentally or not, Bugs, Crime Traveller and Jonathan Creek all have a distinct flavour of the 1960s - of The Avengers, early Dr Who and Mission Impossible. Is there a baby-boomer ghost in the BBC machine?

Jonathan Creek stars Caroline Quentin, who, having unshackled herself from husband Paul Merton and the ghetto of Men Behaving Badly (where she plays the thankless but pivotal role of Dorothy), finds herself coupled to yet another comic - Alan Davies, who plays the shambling, duffle-coated illusionist's assistant of the title. It must be said that Davies, with his dopey, sub-Eddie Izzard patter, is more appealing here than in the countless comedy panel shows he graces.

Written by David Renwick (One Foot in the Grave), these are basically "locked room" mysteries with a magical bent. The first story involves a lecherous painter, shot dead in flagrante by a masked intruder. The wife, a glossy women's magazine editor, is suspected, but, the morning of the crime, she never left her 13th floor, sealed-windowed office. Or did she? Very entertaining it is, too - spilling the beans on several hoary old tricks of the illusionist's repertoire. Though, I shouldn't volunteer for any Magic Circle sword tricks, if I were Renwick.

A real-life mystery is posed by The Works documentary, A Death in Venice (Sun BBC2), which pokes among the ashes of La Fenice, the gorgeous 200-year-old Venetian opera house, burned to its brick shell by arsonists in January 1996. It seems that the Mafia torched La Fenice, whose lovely gilt and painted infrastructure ("Like being inside a diamond": Dame Joan Sutherland) witnessed premiers of both La Traviata and Rigoletto - and that a new form of terrorism had been born. It's already been dubbed "cultural terrorism" (the Mafia similarly bombed the Uffizi art gallery in Florence) and Franco Zeffirelli reckons this one is as serious as the killing of a person. The Mafia do that as well, of course.

"You have to look as if you could work down a mine, as well as read Proust," was the advice given to the fledgling actor Sean Connery - and in the midst of Scene by Scene with Sean Connery (Sat BBC2), an extremely relaxed chat in Edinburgh with a be-kilted Moviedrome host Mark Cousins, the one- time navvy does, indeed, unselfconsciously drop Proust. Connery doesn't do that many interviews, and this is the best one I can remember seeing. It's non-showbizzy, and helped enormously by Cousins knowing his movie onions. By the way, did you know that Noel Coward was originally going to play Dr No?

Dancing for Dollars (Sun C4), about how an American businessman got himself into an awful lot of trouble when he tried importing the Bolshoi Ballet into Las Vegas, is written about by Louise Levene elsewhere in today's paper. Meanwhile, Everyman (Sun BBC1) relates the extraordinary story of the Vietnamese woman, Kim Phuc, whose life was changed forever by that Pulitzer Prize winning photograph from the Vietnam War of a napalm- scorched nine-year-old girl running screaming up a country road. That was Kim.