But once you got past the celebrity nature of the jury - and the fact that an ex-con (Jeffrey Archer), someone who'd spent two years on remand (the rapper Megaman), a woman whose daughter had been murdered (legal campaigner Sara Payne) and an ex-footballer (Stan Collymore) had been passed by counsel to try a rape case involving a footballer as a defendant - then it suddenly became the most grippingly believable thing ever. My incredulity was very quickly set aside: near the start of the first episode, and barely five minutes past the nine o'clock watershed, the alleged victim was giving the most graphic account of her ordeal; it was later followed by the equally graphic medical evidence for the prosecution. These moments admittedly trod a fine line between plainness and salaciousness, but the actress did such a good impression of real anguish that it wasn't long before you were completely swept along with the case. For the next four days, I was engrossed.

Of course, every so often you'd think: 'Why the hell are the jury, especially the actors in the jury, taking all this acting going on in front of them so seriously?' But they were all game for the experiment, and very quickly the group divided up into emotional browbeaters (Collymore and Megaman), dispassionate analysers of the evidence (all of the rest at some point) and the confused (all of the rest at other points). In this and other ways, the show was an education about the British (and, in essence, Irish) court process.

The asides from the real legal people were enlightening, and the observation of how the verdict was finally reached in the jury room were - as the judge himself said - as good an insight as you'll get (outside of actually doing jury service) into how juries reach verdicts. The verdict in this 'case', by the way, was not guilty.

The Verdict was reality reconstituted, and probably easier to watch for that fact; The Hospice - a fly-on-the-wall series filmed in a Dublin hospice - is an unflinching witness to 'real' reality, making it at times almost impossible to watch. At other times the programme made you feel queasy for the wrong reasons. Film-maker Alan Gilsenan was palpably close to exasperation when, interviewing a man in visibly steep decline, he tried in vain to draw from him some revelatory statement about the experience. You could understand the film-maker's dilemma - stay with a moment few film-makers are ever granted and risk looking insensitive, or give up the chance and allow the man his final privacy; in the event, the camera lingered a little longer than was perhaps decent, but at last withdrew.

Otherwise the show was unquestionably tactful. The most heart-wrenching scenes involved a man called Paddy who in interviews seemed so lucid and sharp.

When suddenly he took a turn for the worse, we watched from outside his room as family members entered to say their goodbyes.

Then a slide-show of photo portraits from his life played on screen, which, in a subtle and very moving way, conveyed how epic and heroic even the most regular and quietly-lived lives are.

From the profound to the bathetic, and Rob Vance on Urban Tales, a sort of magazine show about the hidden corners of Irish urban history, which in itself brings on a strange feeling of time travel by virtue of its computer graphics straight out of 1993. If these tales are so fascinating they should have been allowed to be told simply, with the aid of a disembodied narrator, and not with the egomaniacal Vance intruding on every scene and treating his audience like eight-year olds. For all his obvious and admirable enthusiasm, he's a terrible TV presenter; I'm guessing that in reality he has a very fast-moving speaking voice, and that, for television, someone told him to take a pause every three of four words. The result, as it comes across, is like taking LSD and 'listening' to tar move. It's actually no exaggeration to say the show is a physically demanding viewing experience - one of the physical demands being not to reach for the remote control before the end of each sentence.

Reviewed The Verdict Sunday to Thursday, BBC Two The Hospice Monday, RTA One Urban Tales Tuesday, RTA One