There was a middleaged woman who I thought was going to turn into Hot Flush, the menopausal avenger. And there was a cranky old headmaster who I thought might get trapped in some revolving doors and become Underwhelmo, the world's least impressive superhero. But wouldn't you know, it was the younger and generally betterlooking people we should have been focusing on all along.

These are the supposedly average folk from around the world who find out they have special powers and, over the course of the next 15 episodes, join together to fight evil. But by the middle of episode two, we were still being introduced to new characters, the last (you'd hope) of many character introductions that made the opening double-bill of Heroes so disjointed and sluggish.

As yet, the only thing that's really clear is that Heroes thinks it's more clever than it is. There's a portentous voiceover throughout, full of psychobabble about the untapped potential of the human something or other.

And it fancies itself as having a bit to say about an America still traumatised by 9/11: there's all this talk of massive explosions in Manhattan and, in one scene, there's a shadow of a low-flying plane that could be an augury of an event to come. Is it worth sticking around to see what it is?

In its ads and trailers for Heroes, Channel 6 gives heavy rotation to David Bowie's 'Heroes'; by the end of a turgid two hours, the tune I couldn't get out of my head was Black Grape's 'Kelly's Heroes' and its refrain of "Don't talk to me about Heroes. . ."

One-off drama Recovery featured David Tennant playing another unwilling hero, in this instance a guy trying to rebuild his life after getting run over by a truck and suffering brain injury.

It was a role that required the actor to do little more than look wide-eyed a lot of the time, and to shout childishly and say every word he spoke with emphasis.

Which isn't to say it was an was incredible was that he didn't have so much as a bruise or a scratch when he woke up in hospital. To say I was unconvinced by the thing as a whole is to put it mildly.

Unconvinced, unmoved - a horrible thing to admit given the subject matter, but the flashback scenes of a pre-accident Tennant and his wife playing the smug young couple by way of setting up a deliberately stark contrast with what came later really did for it as far as I was concerned.

The latest in the 'Only Human' strand of documentaries took a more daring but dangerous approach to depicting mental illness in its observation of the employees of a hotel in England which trains people with learning difficulties for jobs in hospitality and catering. The idea behind the hotel is that the trainees are treated as completely regular by the non-learning-disabled staff, who all seemed like a great bunch; very dry of humour, which you probably need in such an environment.

The programme took its cue from this tack: 'If the people who run the hotel are uninhibited in the way they laugh with the trainees, then we should be too.'

An admirable approach, to a point - the point being when you call your programme The Strangest Hotel in Britain and soundtrack lots of scenes with whimsical, even farcical, music.

In many cases you felt like you were being invited to laugh at the trainees. To give an example:

there was one scene in which the anonymous interviewer asked a guy called Matthew - who, we were told a little earlier, was keen on finding a girlfriend outside the confines of the hotel - how on earth he hoped to find romance on civvie street. Cut to a shot of Matthew prowling the pavements as some music straight out of a '70s blaxploitation movie squirted away in the background. Dodgy, dodgy.

Finally, travel series Time On Their Hands was back last week; the twist, as before, is to pack elderly people off to some overseas destination, give them just Euro500 and see how they get on. You'd find a way of getting offended by both title and concept no matter what way you looked at them, so maybe it was wise to kickstart the new season on the path of least controversy with the sort of person most likely to be at ease with maturity, mortality and vows of poverty: a nun.

Reviewed

Heroes Thursday, Channel 6 Recovery Sunday, BBC1 The Strangest Hotel In Britain Monday, Channel 4 Time On Their Hands Monday, RT� One