Frances Grant: Oprah puts the wind up

How thoughtful of TV3. Halfway through epic six-part thriller The Grid, the channel has come up with something more urgent than global terrorism for us to worry about.

True, The Grid wasn't flawless. It did require us to swallow Julianna Margulies as a woman who always could find a window for sizzling sex in her busy schedule co-ordinating the major intelligence agencies of the Western world.

And some of the lines were clunky enough to topple an edifice or two of consumer culture in their own right.

But it was a drama with a scope and purpose that we are rarely treated to in these times of reality-trivia-obsessed TV. And it had a sophistication jettisoned long ago by the ever more breathless and cliched terrorist drama 24.

Never mind all that. TV3 pulled the show to make way for terrorism of a much more urgent kind: that which we must learn to exercise over our bodies in a too affluent society with a pathological fear of ageing.

Who better to put the wind up us - literally, in last week's special on how to maintain a healthy colon - than that doyenne of influence, US talk show queen Oprah Winfrey?

What better way to digest dinner at 8.30pm than to watch Oprah and a doctor with a book to push struggling with the euphemisms required to talk about faeces and flatulence on prime-time TV.

Never let it be said that Oprah neglects to deliver public service TV. You have to hand it to her: not everyone moves with such ease - forgive the word choice in the context - from showing off her itsy-bitsy heels to wrangling with a diseased intestine for the cameras, fetchingly accessorised in purple surgical gloves.

And Oprah is certainly pushing the boundaries of candidacy for talk show guest: Sarah Jessica Parker, say, in the spotlight one week, America's most constipated the next.

The show offered some interesting information, if only Oprah didn't feel the need to process it into her excruciating baby talk. Or to endlessly repeat the last two words of what her guest said, as if that constitutes some kind of repartee.

A few harder questions might have added variety, such as asking the good doctor why humans, after hundreds of thousands of years of survival, suddenly desperately need diet supplements. Or why there's no meat, or indeed any protein other than fish, among the recommended foods.

Oprah knows her audience's limits. Too many details could constipate the brain and we're obviously here to get that bolus moving, people.

Speaking of brains, this week we say goodbye to a show which has been allowed to run its natural course to the end of the season. Despite the tender years of its target audience, Veronica Mars was one of the best on the box.

Its heroine was a little misnamed, however, being a superhero who, unusually, relied on her mental powers rather than physical prowess.

Young women do not always come from butt-kicking Mars, some are from a more cerebral and savvy planet. The teenage PI used logic, deduction and persuasion to defy the bullies and defend the helpless in her troubled town of Neptune.

Let's hope the show survives tomorrow's conclusion to its major storylines -who killed her best friend and who is her real dad - and keeps some powder dry for future seasons. Given its intelligence and inventiveness so far, all the vital signs are good.