Murderland

ITV1

The title of the writer David Pirie's new thriller, the one marking Robbie Coltrane's return to ITV, should have given its makers a clue about which way to go with it - if, that is, they wanted to avoid it becoming a Coltrane-fest. “Murderland”, it was explained on Murderland, is the zone a bereaved child enters after a murder: he or she becomes “crime obsessive”. One could see the possibilities, dramatically speaking, for Carrie, the 13-year-old who discovers her prostitute mother killed and catches a fleeting glimpse of her killer. She might distrust the adults trying to help her, devise deranged theories about who did it, or want to kill someone herself.

Yet Bel Powley, the 17-year-old playing Carrie, did not convince us that she had truly entered this new territory. If she was crime obsessive, she was so in a rather gauche Nancy Drew way. Maybe this is how we were meant to read her Saturday stage-school performance. For the structure of the three-part drama demands us to believe that Carrie has repressed the unsolved murder for 15 years.

We meet her on the eve of her posh wedding, by which time Carrie has grown up into Carol and Powley morphed into Amanda Hale, who, at least, shares her cut-glass vowels (so different from her prozzy mother's). On her big day she flees her country hotel, running through a field like Debbie Reynolds on The Debbie Reynolds Show, and abandons her Vera Wang wedding dress beneath a tree. “The memories won't stop but if I look hard enough they'll tell me what really happened to her,” she voice-overs. At this point Murderland succumbed to a severe case of the flashbacks. Enter, at last, Coltrane.

As the dodgy, boozy DI Douglas Hain, the Scotsman tries only moderately hard not to recreate his performance as Fitz in Cracker and who cares if he fails? He was still the most interesting figure in the piece even if he had only a little to do in episode one, which was told from Carrie-Carol's perspective. Whenever he did have something to do, he did it compellingly, even if it was just cadging a sweet off Carrie. His two-line speech denying her suggestion that he could not have children - “Lost a wee boy. Lived a few hours” - was the best moment in a generally unabsorbing hour.

Life

BBC One

The BBC - or BBC Earth as it brands itself when it feels like it - should be daring and rename its new natural history series Death. Although episode two of Life did show a couple of copulations (a chameleon rape), the birth of a sea snake (mother nowhere to be seen), and some great escapes (a pebble toad rolled itself up and bounced down a mountain to escape a tarantula), we were soon in Animal Murderland. Fish rolled into the mouths of sleepy cwockadiles (as David Attenborough pronounced them), a chameleon made short work of a praying mantis and we saw the yolk drip from the mouth of a hawk-nosed snake as it devoured an iguana's carefully buried eggs.

The finale, a telly first, apparently, showed the slow, painful death of a water buffalo poisoned by the venomous bite of a Komodo dragon. The cameras followed the dying beast as it attracted an audience of dragons, each licking its Kenneth Branagh lips in anticipation. When the end came, ten of them demolished its carcass in four hours. Even the researcher, Matthew Swarbrick, admitted in the programme's coda that the buffalo must have thought of the camera crew as Death itself. “Just watching animals die - I am not sure how cut out I am for this,” he said. I am not sure if I am cut out to watch it either, but after the stupid and frenetic start last week, Life has settled down into a more respectable, category- by-category approach. After reptiles, next week watch some mammals die.

Aged 8 and Wanting a Sex Change

Channel 4

It is hard not to compare the motives of the makers of a documentary called Aged 8 and Wanting a Sex Change to those of a Victorian freak show owner, but the programme on “transgender kids” last night held little of gynaecological interest to voyeurs. Instead, the stories of Josie and Kyla, two eight-year-old boys living as girls, were sad; their parents' acquiescence not mad but a sign of their love. That said, as Kyla received a perm and highlights at the hairdresser and we saw Josie's mother paint her son's nails while talking of his “breast-bud” envy, how cruelly gender-divided and sexualised modern American life seemed.

The programme was light on the biology and psychology of “gender dysphoria” and failed to press the parents on research that suggested it was for most children a passing phase. Pumping their offspring with hormones at puberty will not only produce irreversible results but sterility. But this was America, where they pursue happiness like a Komodo dragon pursues a buffalo. Everything is for the best. As Karina, the mother of 16-year-old Chris (born Julia), said: “At least we don't ever have to worry about him getting someone pregnant.”

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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