Stuffing art history into the blender for one implausible theory

SOMETIMES you can get to the essence of a television programme with reassuring speed. Nigel Spivey popped up on the latest BBC2 mid-brow cultural epic with the shattering suggestion that the history of art contains numerous depictions of the human body. Yes, one thought, and what else would human beings depict? Next!

Spivey then went on to argue that for 25,000 years humanity's self-portraits, up to and including bra adverts, have contained elements of exaggeration. So what, one thought. Next!

Our "archaeologist and art historian" proceeded to construct a thesis centred on the notion that representations of the body have always been unrealistic, even when they appear to be realistic. Cobblers, one concluded. That just isn't true, and there is no justification for putting prehistory, ancient Egypt, Greece and anything else you can think of, through the blender for the sake of one bite-sized theory. Next!

In Spivey's defence, you could adduce a degree of seriousness. He not only invites you to think, he all but insists that you use the space between your ears for something more than shopping lists.

He was trying to ask what art is, what it might be for and why we persist with it. These are good questions, for which the answers are generally very bad.

Not one involves a single, all encompassing explanation that wouldn't survive for longer than five minutes in a classroom full of 10-year-olds.

Even the most sombre art is essentially playful. We mess around with mass, form, line and colour because we guessed, long before photocopiers, that mimesis is a bit dull. Professor V S Ramachandran from the University of California might prefer to argue that we are pre-programmed like herring gulls to peck away at the same subliminal message. I don't know art, but I know what I don't like, and it's called behaviouralism: this "theory" was a gimmick.

If I was really being f lash I would add that meta-theory resembles a tape-loop. Once you begin to ask why humanity produces art you have forgotten what humanity is. Spivey began by promising that, after he was done, "You'll never look at our world the same way again". "Oh yeah?" said my inner churl. "And what makes you believe you know how I look at the world?"

The first film in this five-part series came close to treating an artistic sensibility as a symptom pointing to a diagnosis, as though making pictures or statues was evidence of a conditioned humanity rather than the human condition itself. The story was also wildly inconsistent in its struggle to drag ancient cartoon fertility figures, formal Egyptian friezes and classic Greek marble buttocks into the same thesis.

Somewhere in the background, you heard the cry of the artist down the ages: spare us from art critics.

New Tricks is spared from the need to be plausible.

Amanda Redman and her trio of retired, odd but mentally agile coppers have a new boss to contend with, one capable of using words, if it is a word, such as "prioritising", but their own daftness is undiminished.

Last night they were re-opening the case of a doubly-bent barrister who was found dead in a car park in Soho in 1980. A notably vindictive brief, he exhibited a taste for short, sharp shocks and pink silk bondage wear.

Who had killed him? No-one had. Or rather, no-one had felt inclined to preserve his life, not even his deluded wife. When your deluded wife is Jenny Agutter, your fate is probably sealed, in any case. What sort of Englishman betrays one of the Railway Children? A tale of transexuality, bondage and establishment hypocrisy took second place, nevertheless, to Redman's three stooges. Alun Armstrong, James Bolam and Dennis Waterman give off the scent of the ageing actor 's competitive testosterone in their shared scenes, but that only adds to the comedy.

Last night, they were bickering over salaries. "Are you fully cognisant of the size of my packet?"Armstrong wanted to know. Whatever it is, it isn't enough. This is fun that matches no theory of art I have ever bothered my head over.