TODAY'S TELEVISION

A popular game in the Seventies was turning down the brilliance on the telly during Top of the Pops and watching the shiny white teeth of the Osmonds dance like butterflies emerging from a cave. Osmond Family Values (Sun BBC1) is a veritable toothfest: milk teeth, missing teeth, and, above all, pre-orthodonty Teeth that Sunk America.

This is a remarkable film in that it takes a subject of unlimited tackiness - Elvis-style spangle suits, small boys in bow-ties sitting on Andy Williams's knee, Marie pushing her own-brand costume dolls on QVC - and treats it with seriousness. And the family respond avidly, spouting insights into their evolution: "We saw the Beatles and we thought, `we godda be who we are'"; their talents: "The Donny and Marie Show was really cutting edge", and their barking mad religious views: their 1974 album The Plan, apparently, predicted that the Mormons' millennial End Time would coincide with current trends, as well as useless but cherishable facts - Crazy Horses, for instance, was banned in Africa because it was thought to be drug-related. Watch it and practise those smiles.

Summer Dance (Sat BBC2) is a bit of a treat, as well: the Paris Opera Ballet performing Rudolf Nureyev's choreography of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. This is a lush take on the double suicide which could wring snivels from the most dedicated post-modernist, in rich sets by Ezio Frigerio. Manuel Legris and Monique Loudieres are the unfortunate pair, Lionel Delanoe is Mercutio and Charles Jude is Tybalt.

Still on the romantic tip, Sunday night's Prom 97 (BBC2) promises to be a corker. Conductor Andrew Litton and sexy young violinist Joshua Bell lead the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in a programme of Roy Harris's Symphony No 3, Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Slushy enough to end the weekend on a high note.

Archaeology, though an exciting discipline, isn't one that springs to mind as making great television. A lot of it, after all, involves aeons spent knee-deep in dust, brushing bits of broken crockery. The achievement of Time Team (Sat, Sun, Mon C4) in managing to win awards, therefore, is all the more impressive. This weekend brings a live version, in which Mick Aston, reader in archaeology at Bristol University, and Tony Robinson, presenter extraordinaire, join an excavation at a secret site somewhere in Britain. This might well turn out to be a weekend-long advertisement for the virtues of the editing suite, but full marks for trying to sex up the subject.

The BBC's latest prime-time drama offering is The Beggar Bride (Sun BBC1), adapted from Gillian White's novel and starring Joe Duttine, Nicholas Jones and Keeley Hawes. This is a twist on the Pygmalion plot, in which Hawes hatches a plan to get out of her nasty council estate by marrying an industrialist and landing a fat divorce settlement. All amusing enough, though there is a nagging irritation about the premise that a girl who can transform herself into toffs' totty can't transform herself into someone with a job.

Finally, Equinox: Secrets of the Psychics (Sun C4) casts an evil eye over the world of psychic phenomena and the controversy that has raged for the past 150 years between believers and Virgos as to whether they actually exist. The programme includes amusing set-ups of seances and the like, but the most interesting fact that emerges is that, when scientists allowed themselves to be duped, it fell to the conjurers to carry on the campaign to debunk the tricksters.