than to allow it to slip away and forget it ever happened?" I beg your pardon, their strategy was to forget Jack the Ripper ever happened? Bollocks, David.Fortunately there were no bollocks on view in Page Three - A Celebration (ITV, Sunday). The programme oozed dubious authority.The upshot of all this oozing was the fingering of a new Jack, one Dr Tumulty, as revealed in the recently discovered correspondence of a senior Scotland Yard rozzer - and as suggested by most American newspapers of the day But Mr Jessel had a problem. From somewhere (before the technology was even invented), film of prosperous London in the late 1880s miraculously surfaced to permit the line "The capital was not all that it seemed London was a tale of two cities". And since I do not have to work to the BBC Producer's Guidelines, perhaps I can go a little further.

My conclusion is Bill and Liz were always several slabs short of a standing-circle and the whole story was a load of old bollocks.The same could hardly be said for Secret History: The Whitechapel Murders (C4, Thursday), could it? I mean, we had David Jessel - the zealous releaser of wrongly convicted prisoners and very serious journalist - claiming staggering new evidence about the true identity of Jack the Ripper. Most contemporary Britons having already been accused and cleared of the murders by previous documentaries, Mr Jessel and Secret History cast their nets further afield and discovered a bisexual Irish-American doctor, with an alleged penchant for collecting uteruses.The script was littered with the ponderous language of journalistic certainty, "Secret History can now reveal...", etc. The Baptist exorcist had blamed it on Druids and dabbling in alternative medicine, and had got them to burn their copy of the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia. The psychic had decided that there was a murder victim present and - lo and behold! - a farmer had once been murdered not a hundred miles away from that very spot.Finally, a resident scientist, one Dr Richard Wiseman, appeared, explaining that this was all very inexplicable, but that maybe it was Bill and Liz's imaginations at work I agree. Liz and Bill were an ordinary couple who lived in a house in Wales where also dwelt evil. The problems of depicting evil were got over by someone periodically frightening a cat and then filming it (to be followed by Rolf Harris and Animal Hospital on tending a traumatised tabby perhaps?), or running round the bushes with the camera at knee level.Liz and Bill had tried everything. Which, essentially, is the premise for Out of This World (BBC1, Tuesday), the latest in a growing number of programmes aimed somewhere between New Age pseudo-spiritualism ("The crystals certainly seem to exercise some force, Keith") and the National Enquirer ("My 12 nights of passion with the man from Mars"). Carol on the stairs, Carol in a big room, Carol in the hall (though, disappointingly, not Carol in the kitchen or Carol in the loo; too mundane, I suppose) held together the disparate elements of the programme, the centrepiece of which was the tale of Liz and Bill Rich.