Thieves in the night

TV REVIEW:Urban Fox Attack More4, Sunday; Identity UTV, Monda; In Loving Memory BBC 2, Wednesda; Homes from Hell UTV, Thursday

WHO KNEW you could buy lion dung? Though, come to think of it, who knew anybody would want to, unless it's some extreme form of gardener's "isn't farmyard manure a bit common" one-upmanship?

In More4's excellent documentary Urban Fox Attack, we learned that there's been a run on lion dung in Hackney, in east London, because urban chicken owners have been told it's the last word in fox deterrent. It's in handy pellet form, and we saw a very angry Howard, gagging slightly from the pong, sprinkling the stuff around his well-appointed coop.

The previous week a fox had done away with a couple of his chickens, and he had 10 new ones to protect. As evidence of their brazenness, he said that he'd been in his home office the previous week when he saw a fox in the back garden, "at 11.30 in the morning - on a weekday," he added, his voice rising in disgust, as if the fox were some sort of slacker who should have been at work at that time of the day. That night, the cameras picked up a glassy-eyed fox tripping into the garden and having a good sniff at the dung, then proceeding into the coop, where the following morning poor Howard found 10 headless chickens.

Overflowing bins are irresistible buffets, and the growing popularity of chickens in city gardens has meant that urban foxes have become a significant problem in London. Mayor Boris Johnson has urged local councils to take action to control the pests, though that's not how many Londoners see it. Of the 40,000 calls a fox charity gets each year, 20 per cent are looking for advice on how to kill the bushy-tailed pests, and 80 per cent are wondering what the animals would like to eat so they can lay on an encouraging night-time feast. "Bunny-huggers," snarled one country chap who clearly doesn't think there's anything fantastic about foxes. Even Howard's neighbour was pro-fox, though for quite a different reason. He wanted them "to reduce the noise pollution from the clucking".

Riete Oord has been filming foxes for three years in Hackney, and she was probably only able to get this documentary screened when the fox attack on twin baby girls as they slept in their bedrooms in May, in the same borough, made the animals seem not quite so cute. In the end, Howard resorted to extreme measures, getting pest control - aka Bruno and his rifle - in. He decided the upstairs bathroom offered the optimum shot and, while sitting on the loo - his army fatigues not quite blending in with the porcelain - picked off a couple of Howard's foxy enemies. Oord's superbly researched film made it clear there were many more where they came from.

AIDAN GILLEN is enough of a reason to watch anything on TV - and not only because he was just about the only character in The Wirewho I could understand (a deeply uncool thing to say, but there you are). In Identity, a new six-part cop drama, he plays DI Bloom, a troubled maverick detective (is there any other kind?), part of a unit that deals with identity fraud. He gets to speak in his native Dublin accent, though we're to understand that, as he's been an undercover cop for 15 years, he's a chameleon and an expert in changing identities. It's very stylish-looking in much the same way as the BBC's recent cop drama Luther, with swooping aerial shots of London, pounding music and quick cuts and cool, modern offices staffed by attractive-looking people.

Bloom's boss is played by Ashes to Ashes' Keeley Hawes. Cue much low-key, entirely unconvincing and unnecessary flirting: identity fraud is such rich ground for plot material it doesn't need a tiresome will-they-or-won't-they subplot. In this week's opener, a man's life is being destroyed by a fraudster who has stolen his identity and run up hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt and ruined his marriage. It turns out that the fraudster, a young computer whizz, has done this several times with equally devastating results and always targeting, because of his own broken home, unfaithful spouses.

The first half of Identitywas gripping, as the team tracked down the culprit, revealing how simple a crime identity theft is and how much information is available in cyberspace about all of us, from our supermarket shopping to our air miles, not to mention the minute-by-minute CCTV tracking as we go about our daily lives, and it's all there, ready for the taking, if you know how. That was the chilling part.

But the script fell apart at the end, with a ridiculous street chase and a conclusion that felt rushed. There was a good teaser at the end, though, with Bloom, whose working uniform is a leather jacket and jeans, seen in a pristine white suit strolling into a party in a blinging London mansion owned by dodgy-looking foreigners, suggesting that Bloom himself may not be who he seems, that he could still be working undercover. Not entirely gripping but worth another look next week.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE to drive too far on our country roads without coming across a roadside shrine, whether it's an engraved stone memorial, a makeshift cross or, as is the case on the lamp post at the end of my road, a simple bunch of petrol-station flowers that appear at the same time every year, Sellotaped and left to wilt. In Loving Memory was a curious, oddly unsatisfactory documentary exploring the growth in the number of roadside memorials in Britain. Its thesis that they are a way for grieving friends and family to take ownership of the place where a loved one - usually a young person - died felt true, but the idea that their growing popularity is a sign of a more secular Britain seemed stretched. There was no mention of the Lady Di effect - when the flowers left by the public outside Kensington Palace covered the street like a carpet and surely started a trend.

One woman told how her sister, who was killed while cycling in London, has now been memorialised with a council-approved "ghost bike" - a white bike locked permanently to the spot where the accident happened. Just like the bunches of flowers hanging on makeshift crosses on roadside verges, it has become a universally understood symbol, and there's one on the canal at Harold's Cross in Dublin to mark the place where a cyclist died. As the woman in the documentary said of the one memorialising her sister, it's "a memorial and a warning that something horrible happened here".

Property purgatory Escape from the zombie housing estate

It's rare that Homes from Hell produces a feeling of envy, but I bet this week's programme had more than a few people trapped in ghost estates wishing they lived over the Border, where the bankruptcy laws give people who make financial mistakes a way out. Sandwiched between the usual grim tale of a house falling down because of dodgy builders and a dream home in the sun left in construction limbo was the story of the Billings, a young Belfast couple who bought their first house in June 2007, just before the market tanked.

Both teachers they took out a 100 per cent mortgage on what the brochure promised would be a smart family-oriented development in Coalisland. They moved in but lasted only six months, because it quickly became clear that they were living in a ghost estate that was never going to be finished or even half-occupied. The empty neighbouring houses were soon vandalised and, as theirs was the only one in the block with heating, it became a magnet for every rodent on the half-finished building site.

Understandably, they left their by-now worthless house and contined to pay £1,000 (€1,200) per month on their £175,000 (€210,000) mortgage. Something had to give, and we caught up with them on the day of their hearing at the bankruptcy session at the Royal Courts of Justice in Belfast. The wife said she felt shame at the thought of bankruptcy but "it feels good that there might be some end to this". Her husband, looking relieved after the three-minute hearing, agreed: "It's horrible in a way, but we are able to draw a line underneath it and move on with our lives."

It sounded an enlightened way out.