Beneath the Skin (ITV1); Live 8 (BBC1/2); Big Brother (C4): ZOE was a teacher who foiled a mugging when she hit the attacker with a watermelon.

It made her a heroine and got her in the local paper, but also seemed to attract some unwelcome attention, in the form of mystery threatening letters. Her boyfriend wasn't much help and the best the police could offer was to suggest she moved. But just as she was collecting her things, she was strangled.

Suspicion moved first to her gardener boyfriend, particularly when one of his clients, Jennifer, started receiving letters in the same hand as Zoe's, one of them lined with razor blades. But when the dead girl's necklace turned up in Jennifer's house, police arrested her husband Dom. He turned out to have been the victim in the failed mugging. But with him in custody, the way was clear for the killer to move in on Jennifer.

Beneath the Skin, which concludes tonight, was unafraid to give its victims a little more character than is normally allowed to those destined for a grisly end. The result was a tense and atmospheric thriller, with some genuine sweaty-palm moments.

Adapted from a novel by husband and wife writing team Nicci French, it was not so much a whodunnit as a whydunnit, with the identity of the killer divulged in the closing scenes of last night's first part. The identity of his next victim was also revealed: the pet shop assistant who sold a hamster to Jennifer's son, and who also happened to be the girlfriend of one of the investigating police officers.

While all this sounds a bit Midsomer Murders, it also sets the scene for showing how the lives of three apparently unconnected victims of a serial killer can be linked, even if they don't know it themselves. The only false note was sounded when the local paper didn't make more of Zoe's mugging-foiling weapon. Surely any journalist worth their salt couldn't have resisted Zoe's melons?

If there was ever any need to demonstrate that no man is an island, there was proof enough in Live 8. Bob Geldof's around-the-world concerts brought together some of the world's biggest pop stars to highlight the themes of debt, trade and aid in advance of this week's G8 summit.

In the original Live Aid, Geldof provided one of the most memorable television moments of the 1980s with his exhortation to "Give us your f*ckin' money", but this time everyone was at it like rabbits, with "f*ck" bandied around with abandon. There was even a "motherf*cking" from one singer.

Perhaps they thought it would give them a share of Bob's halo, but it was all a bit unnecessary. We knew it was important, they didn't need to swear to show how strongly they felt. It must have had the BBC suits squirming and some parents watching with their children wanting to switch over, which wasn't really the objective. At least Madonna had the decency to apologise for her outburst, although that's not really very rock and roll.

It was easy to be cynical in the face of the biggest gathering of self-importance for 20 years, particularly when Coldplay's Chris Martin was telling us it was "The greatest thing ever organised in the history of the world," but when you saw the million and a half people gathered to watch the Philadelphia concert, it gave you hope that it wasn't all just about egos, record sales and honours.

There were spectacular hits - Annie Lennox showing she still had it at 50 - and spectacular misses - Elton John and Pete Docherty murdering Children of the Revolution, but the best toe-curling moment, albeit unintentionally, came courtesy of Jo Whiley and Madonna.

Whiley, whose interviewing never normally gets much more incisive than "I love your new album", asked the woman introduced as the "Queen of Rock and Roll" if she had ever been to Africa. No, said a visibly squirming Madonna. Would she like to go? At this point, it was impossible not to feel sorry for the Queen of Marketing, who must have been regretting ever saying yes to Bob. "I do have friends who go," she winced.

For newly evicted Saskia, challenged about the racial split among the housemates in Big Brother, it wasn't enough to say that some of her friends were black. No. They all were. End of, as she would say.

The dynamics in the house look like making it the most interesting since Nasty Nick's shenanigans all those years ago, but hopefully the loss of one of the main sources of tension won't see it go the way of all the others and lapse into the usual tedium.

How Saskia's puppies, and I'm talking Maxwell and Anthony, cope without her will be compelling. Anthony has already switched his doleful attentions to new girl Orla, although he's also the object of the most disturbing behaviour in the house. Craig's insistence that: "I get your tea, nobody else gets your tea. I get your tea," was seriously worrying, although Anthony, bless him, seems completely oblivious. Poor Craig can make all the cups of tea he likes, but he hasn't got what Orla's got and he ain't going to get what he wants.

Poor Maxwell already cuts a forlorn figure, deprived of Saskia's more intimate attentions as she made a desperate attempt to stay in. Her jangling bangles didn't work, but at least she's got herself a future in magazines. Respectable career? End of.

Published: ??/??/2004