Powerpoint: Whiskers and pale porn

By FRANCES GRANT

Now that Saddam Hussein and his imaginative information minister have disappeared from view, the next great moustache to take over the telly belongs to Professor Robert Winston.

It's a piece of face furniture which has become a regular feature on the small screen: in his latest energetic enterprise the Prof and his expressive whiskers are kept busy explaining, indeed demonstrating whenever possible, the evolutionary history of Human Instinct.

As we know, all too well, Winston isn't one for hiding his light under a, well, big fat mo'. He kicked off the show by getting down and dirty, delivering a calf and showing the bewildered-looking newborn the ropes in Winston's world, "Look at the camera".

The series is as busy as any Winston enterprise. One minute he is unscrolling a giant red ribbon across the African savanna, representing the eons of prehuman history, the next he's hanging out with bull runners in Spain.

There's a human case history or demonstration to illustrate every point. Some - the Prof letting a spider walk over his hand, monitoring the heart-rate of a man being chased by a bull - are wearying. The human survival instinct is incredibly powerful, we learned, driving men and women to superhuman feats of strength and risk-taking.

In a heroic act of suppression of the fight or flight response, I managed to stay on the couch through the entire first episode, proving the Professor's final thesis that instinct can sometimes be overcome. Lack of personal proximity dealt with the overwhelming instinct to reach out and test the authenticity of that Groucho Marx mo'.

The whiskers in the Victorian lesbian costume drama Tipping the Velvet were not nearly so impressive, belonging as they did to old roues looking to buy a bit of tender boy flesh in the surprisingly sanitary-looking back alleys of 19th-century London.

Writer Andrew Davies, who adapted the script from Sarah Waters' rather more atmospheric novel, famously promised this drama would be "absolutely filthy", thus guaranteeing reams of tabloid outrage and fuss when it aired in Britain.

Alas, far from being outrageously graphic and Sapphic, this romp was merely ridiculous - a disappointment after its oh-so-soft and aphrodisiacal promise at the beginning, "Open an oyster and it's a secret world in there".

There was not enough plot for a music hall skit, the actual music hall performances were weedy and unconvincing, there was no character development and the setting of Victorian London looked like a cheaply executed stage backdrop.

Scorned lover Nan's descent into "rent boy" prostitution came across like a jolly sort of parlour game, while her soldier outfit for her "street work" looked like something straight out of the Christmas pantomime.

The two leads (Rachael Stirling and Keeley Hawes) were far too sweet to be raunchy, fetching as they were in their intriguing Victorian undergarments. Apart from a higher bare breast count, the sex scenes were as coyly choreographed as any on the telly (although the second part with its infamous appendage and sex slavery had yet to air at time of writing).

I'm sure there's nothing like a bit of lesbian soft porn to interest schoolboys or to shock the old dears watching TV One with their Sunday night cocoa down at the rest home, but compared to the suspenseful lesbian love strains on the likes of Bad Girls, At Home With The Braithwaites and even ER, this melodrama was pale and uninteresting.

Surely even the keenest of "dykongraphers" can't be interested in claiming Tipping the Velvet as a triumph of minority-interest programming.