O Mistress mine, where's the plot roaming?

What she watched:

Mistresses BBC1

Damages BBC1

Free Agents C4

While indulging in Mistresses - a drama for which the description "frothy" would fail to do justice to the level of its bubbling liquidity and the word "escapist" in no way accurately reflect the extreme distance between the real world and the emotional theme-park that is "Mistressworld" - it is of course permissible for viewers of either sex to decide to suspend their disbelief for an hour and think: "Hell, the world is grim, it's February, sod it, let's just sit back and enjoy seeing Shelley Conn in her smalls..."

Good call. Verily, an hour will whiz by; an hour in which four two-dimensional versions of television's default post-Sex and the City woman - ie a tediously shoe-shopping, multi-tasking, go-getting, issue-laden, risk-taking yet also risk-averse, endlessly conflicted, consumingly-guilty/guiltily-consumerist, shallow, shy, selfish, modern, urban (well, living in Bristol) blah blah ya-da ya-da creature - will drink a lot of white wine (I can't type the word "chardonnay" without feeling faintly queasy) and screw up their lives so predictably badly you may well momentarily lose your mind and smack your forehead with a stiletto while shouting "bloody women!". Yes, even if you're a woman. Hell, especially if you're a woman.

But let's get up to speed. In the first series, Shelley Conn's Jessica was a sexual temptress dipping her toe in the balmy come-hither waters surrounding the isle of Lesbos, thus providing some attractive, mildly zeitgeisty ratings-grabbing - though obviously entirely uncynical - lipstick-chick-on-chick action.

But just as Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson are, like, so last year, Jessica has now moved on, and at the end of last week's episode married Mark (Oliver Milburn), a man as wanton, sexually predatory and entirely incapable of commitment as she. Ding-dong!

Meanwhile, Dr Katie (Sarah Parish) has got over that inconvenient, not to mention potentially career-derailing, mercy-killing-of-her-married-lover mess she found herself in last year, and is back to work in an environment heaving with so many implausibly attractive medical types it's in danger of turning into Holby City, or the hospital in Bodies that used to employ Patrick Baladi as the world's most terrifyingly incompetent (but handsome) obstetrician; or even Green Wing

Anyway, with his "medical" career behind him, Baladi is now Richard - the creepy (though this could be a residual creepiness left over from his Bodies character rather than a genuine character trait of Richard's) live-in lover of the frumpy cake-baking harried mum Trudi (Sharon Small, never to be seen in her smalls in this show), who is quite possibly cosying up with a would-be serial killer. We can but dream, eh?

Meanwhile, Orla Brady's Siobhan is, among other things, doing an awful lot of staring vacantly into the middle distance, which is dramatic shorthand for... er, presumably whatever the director needs it to be. Unfortunately "doing an Amanda Burton" (as a generation of actresses amusingly describe it... or would if I had anything to do with it) is less likely to make me empathise with a character than giggle at them. With the addition of some self-consciously moody music I'm practically on the floor, while if you chuck in an entirely demented plotline I'm not only on the floor but, even as I admire Orla's radiant loveliness (she's 47, goddammit), I'm on the floor beside myself

But dear God... what the hell is going on with her plot? Siobhan is enthusiastically cuckolding her long-suffering husband, the lovely Hari (Raza Jaffrey. And one may fairly substitute wet for long-suffering. Slam some bloody doors, man!) with a series of hot sexy strangers she picks up in a hotel bar conveniently heaving with available men, by deploying the time-honoured and failsafe (if only in TV dramas) staring-at-the-floor-and-wearing-a-barely-perceptible-coquettish-half-smile technique... But now, having enjoyed the best sex ever with a man who turns out to be a cruel-eyed stalker, Siobhan is recognising that being stalked by someone even spookier than Trudi's boyfriend is something she is going to have trouble squeezing into an already-packed schedule, what with also being a mother and a lawyer and a full-time chardonnay-quaffing shoulder-to-cry-on BF to three other women.

I'm sorry, I'd better "gather" (as dear Kate Winslet would say) because that was almost a rant, wasn't it? Mistresses infuriates me, because above everything I resent the fact that the absurdity of its female characters-cum-caricatures and their tawdry emotional predicaments (making Sex and the City look like The Ascent of (Wo)Man) doesn't stop it from being relentlessly bloody watchable. So, same time next Tuesday then?

Meanwhile, the equally addictive, albeit for totally different reasons, US thriller Damages has returned, and though I am in danger of repeating myself for, ooh, what? the fourth week running?... perhaps you may now have noticed how well they do this stuff in the US of A, notwithstanding the fact that last week Mistresses had over three million more viewers.

Of course there's not really any comparison between what is effectively an overgrown Bratz cartoon masquerading as some sort of an insight into what it means to be a woman in the 21st century, and a sophisticated, deftly plotted, beautifully written, directed and acted mega-budget 13-part thriller, with a cast that includes Glenn Close and - new this season! - William Hurt (last seen onscreen together in 1983's The Big Chill, a movie which was, for this 19-year-old, at least, slightly more than just a movie).

Anyway, Close was delighted to be reunited with Hurt ("We started out in New York together in theatre and then, of course, our big connection was doing The Big Chill, and that bonded us for life. So to have him come back... was like skating on very smooth ice. I loved it"). She has also described Damages as a "13-hour movie", allowing her to achieve more with one character than any movie ever could. The results are consistently spectacular.

Close's super-lawyer Patty Hewes may not yet be pulling strangers in hotel bars but she remains the still, cold, damaged heart of Damages; a character of compelling complexity with newly added layers of guilt since ordering the failed hit on her protégé, Ellen Parsons (lovely Rose Byrne, who is also noticeably too skinny this season). Meanwhile Parsons is, in turn, still mourning the brutal murder of her fiance, while back working with Hewes, and undercover with the Feds.

In Hewes, Close has created the 21st-century's first major female TV protagonist, a character we're primed to loathe but can't, because Close makes her plausibly human against the odds. A cross between a Devil in Prada and a Soprano in Primark, she is TV's most loveable sociopath outside of The Simpsons

Suffice to say, these are female characters operating at the sharp end of post-feminist multi-tasking. Not for Parsons and Hewes any blind panics over unironed school uniforms and unbaked cakes or, come to that, any raucous nights with the girls around the supermarket chardonnay. Last week, when Patty and Ellen met for some out of office-hours bonding (and back-stabbing and double-crossing...), they did so over a bottle of Chateau Lafite. I think it's fair to say you can taste the difference.

While Ellen has coped with the sudden and traumatic death of her fiance by having counselling and plotting her revenge, when the same thing happened to Helen (Sharon Horgan) in Free Agents, she popped down to Snappy Snaps and ordered some oversized canvases of her beloved before embarking on a one-night stand with Stephen Mangan's Alex. Admittedly Helen's fiance wasn't murdered, he had a heart attack, but I think Ellen could still take a leaf out of Helen's book: when in need of a quick-fix Elastoplast for the soul you can probably do a lot worse than sleep with somebody - anybody? - who was in Green Wing

Anyway, Free Agents is very funny - laugh-out-loud funny, in fact. It is also filthy enough to have the continuity announcer advise that there will be "very adult language, content and humour from the start, and throughout", which, short of hearing them whisper "mmm yeah baby, press the red button - oh! - now...(etc)" is pretty much as big a continuity come-on as it's possible to get.

Anyway, most of the really funny - and, for the purposes of TV criticism, regrettably unrepeatable filthy stuff - comes, as it were, courtesy of Alex and Helen's boss, the vile Stephen, played quite wince-makingly brilliantly by Anthony Head - about whose surname it would be impossible to ever conjure a single joke, however hard one may try. Yes, I'm afraid I'll leave that sort of overly cheap, smutty humour to critics who drink chardonnay.

Extreme makeovers

How I love a Holby trailer. Have you seen the one in which Connie (Amanda Mealing) is transformed into a snake and Faye (Patsy Kensit) gets back in touch with those 80s pop video roots? It's Comic Relief without the red noses.

But why is it only Holby that gets the Hammer House of Horror treatment? I think more shows could do with some extreme rebranding. For example, Blue Peter could easily reverse those falling ratings by recreating the "Thriller" video in their garden. As any parent who has just been forced to get creative over half-term will testify, it's amazing what you can do with old yoghurt pots and a B&Q's worth of sticky-back plastic.

But it's not just middle-of-the-road drama and pensionable kids TV that needs a makeover - current affairs is a shoo-in for more gore. Face it, wouldn't you want to see the news read by zombies? Oh, hang on....

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