TV preview
By Damien Love

The story goes that when Tim Burton was casting The Joker in his Batman movie, his first choice was James Woods, because "he wouldn'tneedmake-up".Andevenif Burton never said that, you can see what he means.

Across a 35-year career, Woods, with his long assassin's face and sudden leer, has established himself as a man you can trust to be untrustworthy. Few actors have been so wired. His great theme has been The Rat, his keynote role as the opportunistic, sleazy hero of Oliver Stone's Salvador: a rat who describes himself as "a f***ing weasel".

This bedrock of glittering rattiness is what Shark, Five's latest American import, is built upon, and it's a foundation so solid that the rest of the show can get away with being a bit flimsy.

Woods plays Sebastian Stark who, when we first encounter him, is a Los Angeles defence lawyer devoted to getting the rich off, and getting rich doing it. He's a living pair of shades, the best, most ruthless and least-troubled by scruples in the business. The only thing he loves more than winning is rubbing the district attorney's nose in it afterwards. "I eat prosecutors for breakfast," he says. "They're my main source of fibre."

But then, tragedy. Shortly after he wins the case for his latest client - a celebrity charged with attempting to murder his wife - the guy actually does batter her to death and Stark slides into crisis, moping around his funky modernist house in the hills. At his lowest ebb, he gets an offer: switch sides, go to work for the DA's office as a prosecutor, and use his dubious methods to nail the kinds of creeps he used to defend.

And so he does. But the DA (Jeri Ryan) wants to see him fail, so she hands him a bunch of young, inexperienced (and, this beingmainstreamAmericanTV,good-lookingandpainstakinglyethnically mixed) assistant DAs to work with, meaning Stark must spend as much time butting heads and bullying them into his way of thinking as he does solving cases.

It's this aspect - a cranky guru who holds his co-workers in contempt - that marks Shark as a House clone. Just as Hugh Laurie's grouchy doctor is more interested in illnesses than patients, Stark is less interested in truth and justice than in winning. His manifesto-mantraruns:"Trialiswar; second place is death." But Woods is so great at this stuff that he makes clear what's wrong with Shark: the series starts a few years too late. It would have been more interesting, more entertaining, if Stark was still the flashy defence slimeball-for-hire, a virtuoso bastard.

As it is, a lot of sincerity, sentiment and sugar is applied. The main subplot is all saccharine: Stark trying to forge a relationship with his estranged, drippy teenage daughter, Julie (Danielle Panabaker), who says things such as: "You don't realise it - but you need me." The theme becomes the mellowing of Stark's cut-throat ways. But it's these ways that we really want to see.

Even when the world around him turns to goo, however, Woods holds it together. Whether regarding his kid in silent sorrow, basking in his own genius, or chewing out anunderling,he is, simply, brilliant to watch. His preening swagger and motormouth were made for the machine-gun paceof1930sgangstermoviesand screwball comedies. When he gets hold of a few lines of tasty dialogue here, it's like watching James Cagney when he got a chance to dance.

After last week's hurricane of drivel, Fallen Angel, this week's ITV drama, Mobile, feels like a major work. It's not, but it is satisfyingly well-crafted pulp. A conspiracy thriller,itrevolvesaroundaterrorism campaign waged against a mobile-phone company, Corsoncom, whose masts are being blown up and whose subscribers are randomly targeted by a sniper. Things, of course, are not what they seem.

Each of the three episodes focuses on a particular figure, peeling off a layer of mystery. In the opener it's Eddie Doig (Phoenix Nights legend Neil Fitzmaurice), an embittered former Corsoncom engineer with good reason to be bitter, given he is dying from a brain tumour he blames on his job.

Well-played by a strong cast, Mobile isgrandlymountedandambitiously convoluted; the plot is ridiculous when you drag it into daylight, but well worked-outwithinitsownboundaries.Most importantly, it moves fast, and makes you want to know what happens next. And, if you have ever been annoyed by someone braying into their mobile on the train, it has at least one scene you might applaud.

Artist: Shelia Stewart Title: "From the Heart of the Tradition" Cat no: TSCD515 Track: "Queen Amang the Heather" Copyright owner: (P) Topic Records Ltd 2000 Web Site: www.topicrecords.co.uk Price: £13.25 incl. postage & VAT