Bigwigs and asteroid belts

TVReview: It's understandable why the Four Courts and King's Inns opened their corridors to the cameras for Legal Eagles. Here, they may have believed, was an opportunity to demystify the legal profession, to show the humanity beneath the wigs.

The Freemasons must have thought the same when they too recently agreed to hold their institution up to the lens. However, it ultimately revealed that when absurd ritual becomes quite ordinary to a person it engenders a damaging lack of self-awareness. Perhaps they expected candour to be met with understanding, but received a shock when it only reinforced stereotype.

Among the aspects to emerge from the opening programme of Legal Eagles was the quasi-Masonic hue that colours the profession. For instance, as is common both here and in Britain, King's Inns students attend compulsory dinners, where they must bow to their seniors when they arrive in the room.

This is the 21st century. Nobody should have to bow to anyone. The doors were closed once the dinner began. You do not open yourself to the cameras, only to then decide that you have something to hide.

Harry Magee, journalist and former law student watched the bewigged bustle in the courts and remarked that "you could be looking back through the 18th century". And while this series attempts to lift the lid on the modern judiciary, and the difficulties in establishing oneself within it, the most immediate result was to remind us not only of the stubborn elitism but of the anachronistic reminders. The wigs - with their scrawny plaits and tight albino curls - are optional, but most wear them anyhow. One barrister explained: "If the Pope came out to give the papal blessing wearing Levi jeans and a T-shirt . . .". Why, the Pope will be most flattered by the comparison.

Yet it was a more subtle decision which was most worrying. Legal Eagles followed Clare, a part-time student who worked in the civil service by day and studied at night. But the Inns has since cancelled the part-time barrister course. Here was a woman with perspective and wider experience of life entering a world still too reliant on privilege and tunnel-vision. By the end, she had withdrawn from the Inns. She had been lost to the Bar, and it is likely to be poorer for it.

THEY MAY CARRY a reputation as people who believe they can walk on water, but for all the arcane ritual barristers do not persist in attempting to walk through walls. In Crazy Rulers of the World, Jon Ronson met members of the American military, past and present, quite convinced that they could do just this. Imagine how this would change modern warfare. Yes. Of course. You could run away much more quickly.

Ronson has developed a good career out of tracking down the frightened and the frightening, the strange and those who believe in the strange. Here, he combines all these. Traumatised by both the horror and defeat of Vietnam, the US military began to look for alternative ways of waging war and looked to alternative culture to help it.

Along with "wall walking", it is claimed that Special Forces soldiers learned how to stop goats' hearts simply by staring at the creatures. Ronson tracked down one of these men, Guy Savelli, who had left his life of staring at animals to open a kung-fu and dance studio in Ohio. Did you really kill goats by staring at them, asked Ronson. Yes, replied Savelli. In fact, he had killed his hamster just the week before; stared at him until he fell from his little wheel and twitched his last whisker. He promised to show Ronson a videotape of it, but couldn't find it. But he did find a tape of a goat being stared at by some soldiers. The goat, it must be said, did look mildly discombobulated by the attention.

Ronson, as ever, narrates the whole thing as if writing a magazine feature, with lots of "he said" and "I said"; but he is an engaging presence, deliberately neurotic, almost Woody Allen-esque in his reporting style. It is a practised naivety that encourages others to open up to him. Or to hurt him. Ronson is not afraid of humiliation, but he is afraid of pain. He visited a gentleman who has made a career of showing soldiers how to disable the enemy by targeting their bodies' chakra points. He has invented a small plastic device that looks like a Phillippe Starck bottle opener, but which inflicts pain in some ingenious ways and which soldiers have carried to Iraq.

Ronson, a man so wispy that a mere whiff of cannon shot would be enough to fell him, was given a comprehensive demonstration of its effectiveness until he begged for mercy.

Most interesting, though, were the plans drawn up by one lieutenant colonel which applied New Age thinking to conflict. The result was the First Earth Battalion and the accompanying document looked like Judge Dredd if drawn while on LSD. Soldiers, it suggested, would go into battle carrying lambs and piping local music from their tummies. They would hug the enemy. If the enemy refused to hug back, they would kill them. Make love, then war.

What makes all this weirdness increasingly serious is that several of these men, says Ronson, have been called back into action to fight the War on Terror; although, if that was hugging that was going on in Falluja this week, I would hate to see the fighting.

WHILE CHANNEL 4 was showing us something so implausible it sounds as if it's been made up, the BBC was busy making up something quite plausible. The BBC may still occasionally delight us with the breathtaking accomplishment of a series such as The Blue Planet, but much of the station's science programmes now come straight from a computer graphics package. You're as likely to tune in to find a man in khakis being chased by a Stegosaurus as he explains just how the long-extinct creature protected its young from nosy television presenters.

The latest in this colourful genre is Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets. Having got past 2001 without a genuine space odyssey, the BBC has created one. Through a six-year tour of the solar system, a crew of international astronauts visits some of our neighbouring planets and gets up to all sorts of adventures.

It is not that creativity cannot add to the information. Horizon recently aired an excellent documentary on the current Cassini-Huygens mission to Jupiter, and gave us an artificial vision of its moon Titan that was quite beautiful: a Grand Canyon-esque landscape bathed in orange, where fat methane raindrops fell as if in slow motion.

But it admitted that this was speculation, yet to be confirmed by a robot's-eye view. Space Odyssey, though, explained that it was based on "science fact, not fiction." But it was really science fiction dressed as science fact; not quite H.G. Wells, but a distant relative at least. There were no aliens in this first programme, but you have to believe that there'll be at least a hint of them waiting around the next inter-planetary corner.

The planets are beautifully rendered, as you would expect, and the spacecraft itself is also finely detailed, both inside and out. But for spells the information was as thin as the Martian atmosphere, even as the wisecracks between characters came thick and fast. Precious science had to wait while cheap drama took precedence.

The astronauts began their tour with Venus, where showers of sulphuric acid wrecked the equipment. The scientific conclusion? "Hellhole". They stopped off on Mars, where the astronauts scuttled about the planet on a rover while rock music blared from the car stereo. Having swung around the sun and then narrowly avoided getting clobbered in the asteroid belt, the next stop is Jupiter. However, as we enter next week's concluding part, one of the astronauts is shivering and fretting about a shaving rash that hasn't gone away. If John Hurt is watching, he will be getting flashbacks.

Television science, though, has always taken unorthodox routes in its quest to understand and explain. For instance, on Channel 4 this week there was an early morning science quiz show. Its title: Do Fish Fart? It's a good question. If we find theanswer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of cod.