TV Eye: Aliens made us do it

So George Bush really was an alien. Those of us who long harboured a suspicion there was an extraterrestrial reptilian creature lurking under the skin of that folksy "Texan" persona have been vindicated by this week's pilot episode of the renovated sci-fi series V.

The V is for the visitors who arrived to hover over the Earth's cities in vast stealth bomber-style space craft and treated the gullible humans - always a sucker for pretty faces and a blockbuster - to a big screen presentation the owners of modern sports stadiums could only dream about.

The visitors are attractive and friendly in a plastic kind of way, which makes them indistinguishable from most cast members of any American TV show.

But, it didn't take long before our good-looking, blond-but-intrepid FBI agent stumbled upon their dastardly plan.

The Visitors, we learned, have long had plants on Earth, stirring up chaos and sowing the seeds of the human race's destruction. "Unnecessary wars, economic meltdown" - turns out it was all an alien plot. One of the chief delights of the all-new V is that it hasn't so much been remade as repurposed to disavow the US' recent, inglorious past. Instead of the old "we were just following orders" excuse, it's now "a terrorist cell of aliens made us do it".

There is much else to look forward to. No matter how good the computer graphics, the old ripping off the skin to show the slimy lizard stuff and icy reptilian eyeballs beneath is always going to be pure schlock sci-fi. The aliens seem to have predicated all their knowledge of humanity on all American movies and TV shows. Why else would their Queen insist on her chief PR person being Scott Wolf from Party of Five. They don't seem up with current world events, either, assigning their mother ship to New York City rather than Beijing. Let's hope there's an episode where they meet the People's Army. Or where they find out the man from Texas is no longer the man of the age.

Meanwhile, another man of the age has been lurking on UKTV: the banker who offers fantastic returns, the friend of government, the toast of society, king of speculation, the money man who has the masses queuing in the street to get a slice of the action. No not the Enron blokes or Mr Blue Chip, but Mr Merdle (aka Mr Millions), in a rip-roaring adaptation of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit.

TV One, as reluctant to frighten the populace as any condescending alien, now seems to spurn the kinds of quality programmes that used to have a natural home in Sunday Theatre.

Ironic, really, as Dickens' newspaper serials had the crowds baying for more, even though his arch and complex prose had long sentences and words of polysyllables. Now it is deemed far too strong stuff for our eroded powers of concentration.

However, anyone brave enough to have persevered would have enjoyed a classic BBC adaptation, complete with scriptwriter Andrew Davies' regulation saucy modernisations.

Highlights include a seemingly unprepossessing heroine of great character; proof that Britain is a nation jam-packed with the finest character actors who fairly relish playing against type; LOTR star Andy Serkis playing another great caricature of a hissing villain, the French scoundrel Blandois, aka Lagnier, aka Rigaud.

If you don't get UKTV, wait for the DVD box set and see how powerful and riveting soap can be in the hands of a master social commentator and satirist, the bane of all who set themselves up as "men of the age" or creators of new world orders.