Linda Herrick: Living in your own movie

Scene: A London road, camera tracks a black VW, shot from a helicopter ... or, because of the budget, the top of a very high building. Inside, the occupants of the VW are making a terrifying descent into madness.

They are young parents taking the cherubic child in the back to be babysat by his uncle Art. Last time Art babysat, there was an unfortunate accident with an axe. And anything could happen this time as well, because Art's life is My Life In Film, just about the funniest thing on television right now.

My Life in Film (TV One, Friday, 10.10pm) centres around the extremely banal existence of Art (Kris Marshall), who lives in a flat with his perennially sunny Welsh friend, Jones. Art is a self-absorbed, arrogant yet not overly bright independent low-budget film-maker, who sees the world in terms of every movie he's ever watched. He has a co-dependent relationship with Jones, but, to Art's disgust, Jones has a new girlfriend, Beth. Or cough-Beth, because Art is unable to say her name, such is his disdain for this usurper.

My Life in Film, made by Mark Chappell for BBC3, is a terrific example of how music can manipulate mood. The babysitting episode, with the child tricycling alone through the flat, unexplained (to Art) door-knockings, footsteps on the roof and Art toiling paranoically on a script so scary you have to keep the lights on, was ratcheted up with manic strings going off the scale when actually, whatever was going on was inside Art's manic imagination.

The climax, with an overflowing tub filled with red bath oil (a blood bath!), a TV aerial and, yes, an axe, was The Omen, The Shining and Art's hatred for Beth all rolled into one brilliantly timed disaster.

A week later, Art was on his fifth attempt at getting his driving licence, simultaneously plotting a new script, high on concept, low on everything else ... except balls. Cue, tinny Top Gun guitar and shrill 80s muzak throughout, as Art attended the Best of the Best Motor School and met the instructor, the girl of his lurid dreams.

Strangely, she liked him too. Not a reaction he's used to, of course. When she says, "See you tomorrow," he replies, "You want to?" "In class," she responds.

She did have an excellent technique in helping him to visualise the perfect parallel park, but Art continued to stall. As he explained to Jones, "I'm in a relationship with my work. I want a woman who's unattainable."

Coming up, Art's world through the lens of Shallow Grave, Nine and a Half Weeks and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - variously involving a small amount of money found in the sofa, a wedding video and Art's desperate moves to find some rent money. Not to be missed.

Spookily - or was it? - the night after the Top Gun-on-four-wheels episode, Tom Cruise, the original purveyor of that pile of 80s crud, was on Parkinson (TV One, Saturday, 8.30pm) to promote Collateral, indicating that this show was at least a couple of years old. Truly a man whose life has been made in film, Cruise quickly steered the conversation into a promotion of Scientology, which he believes to be a cure for the woes of dyslexia, ADHD, drug addiction and alcoholism. All other science is rubbish, and his remarkable life proves it.

What a bore. Cruise's more recent behaviour - Katie Holmes, couch-leaping and angry declarations on post-natal depression - have not been greeted warmly, but this is a man living in the bubble of celebrity, following a tightly controlled script devised by L. Ron Hubbard.

Of the two, Art's version of a life in film is far more endearing.