Single-handed Sunday, Monday, RTE
One Keith Barry: Mind, Myth and Magic Monday, RTE
One Mansfield Park Sunday, UTV
Marbella Belles Tuesday, UTV

MAYBE it's always been the way and I just hadn't realised it before, but in recent years, it seems it won't do for a Paddy's weekend to pass without some marquee telly programme on RTE given to agonised national self-analysis.

Personally, I find the idea of being made to reflect on one specific day or group of days above all others as patronising as an American actor with a dodgy Irish accent dressed up in tweeds, though in practice, it can result in very good TV, as we got last year with a very entertaining debate on The Late Late Show. What really is unbearable is when, in studiously trying to avoid one set of cliches, one simply defaults to another set of cliches.

Now, accuse me of making the wildest inferences if you will, but I can just imagine how Single-handed, a two-part homeproduced whodunnit for the bankholiday weekend, started life.

A couple of people sit around a table with a piece of paper, the complete works of Martin McDonagh and JM Synge to hand, and some vague idea they want to deliver a 'dark' rural drama. At the top of the page are written the words 'brooding' and 'gothic'.

They think very hard, but the well is dry, and then, as if in defeat, they find themselves writing the words 'suspicious death', 'dark mutterings', 'bent coppers', 'frustrated sons beating up their mothers' and 'infanticide'. And just to add incest to injury, they make the main character have it off with his sister.

And that was pretty much Single-handed; an uninspired piece of writing brought to some sort of lugubrious half-life, superficially engaging for a while, but growing more and more ponderous and pofaced the longer it went on over its two nights. The only thing to jerk my flagging attention by the end was the fact that the main dead person in it . . . who was required literally to do no more than be a dead eastern European for about 20 seconds . . . was given a credit as "Martina Navratilova".

Much better was Keith Barry:

Mind, Myths and Magic . . . timeless, harmless holiday entertainment.

Sorry . . . did I say harmless? This hour-long special featured our magician-laureate conjuring tricks near druidic burial sites, invoking the spirits of the dead, and generally meddling with powers he could not possibly have understood, with or without the use of magnets and periscopes hidden in a bushes.

The show's finale, which centred around a seance, was so convincing that it was a struggle to see how Barry could have been doing anything other than actually summoning ghosts . . . including the ghosts of recently deceased relatives of the seance participants. It was so terrifying, in fact, that Barry felt the need to pop up at the end, like Nick Ross in Crimewatch, to tell viewers "not to get overly upsetf At the end of the day I'm an illusionist, I'm a magician, I'm a charlatan." Even better, Keith . . . you're not David Copperfield.

The first in a new series of Jane Austen adaptations, Mansfield Park, was in the business of capturing spirits too . . . of its source material, which it did successfully according to someone I know who's read the book; and also of an era, although I don't, by that, mean the early 19th century. No . . .

watching this film, I couldn't help feeling I'd been transported back to the 1970s. I think it was something to do with the squiggly, loopy typeface in the opening credits, straight out of The Onedin Line or The Railway Children; the fetish for golden, late-evening sun rays streaming through trees; and those furiously panning camera shots.

Fly-on-the-wall series Marbella Belles, on the other hand, could have been made anytime from the mid-'80s, when its subjects' bottleblonde and leathery-skinned look was frozen forever in amber.

The name of the programme's a bit misleading. As anyone who knows this part of the Costa del Sol will tell you, Marbella's a lovely, very authentically Spanish town.

The place people think is Marbella, the one of notoriety, and the one featured on this show, is the millionaire and criminals' playground of Puerto Banus, a few miles down the road. Once you cross the white line (and there are plenty of those around) into this place, you might as well not be in Spain anymore; you're in a miniLos Angeles. I was once made a holy show of and then moved on by Puerto Banus's special bicyclemounted police for fishing in the harbour, so I'm delighted to see the place get all the bad publicity this show might bring.

Glad to report, but rather needless to say, with nothing to do all day but loll around their ex-pat wonderland and beautify themselves, the people on this show are an absolute disgrace.