Colditz (ITV1); Mr Harvey Lights A Candle (BBC1): THE ITV1 drama Colditz tore a leaf out of Hollywood's book and took liberties with history.

The real life stories of plucky escapees from the high security Second World War castle prison were interwoven with a love story - not a passionate affair between inmates but with one of the girls left behind in London.

This mix of fact and fiction proved an often uneasy alliance. The combination of daring great escapes and romantic love triangle made odd sleeping partners.

Clearly, a big budget as well as much care and attention had been lavished on the two-part series. But I just couldn't reconcile prisoners crawling through sewers in an escape bid with scenes of gals back home discussing whether they'd "done it". Add Timothy West as a mad inventor - a sort of wartime version of James Bond's Q - and you had something very odd indeed.

While there was real do-or-die tension and frustration over the relentless attempts to escape from the fortress, I couldn't have cared less as the bad chap back home lied and eventually killed to protect his secret.

Jack Rose (Tom Hardy) regretted he'd never asked girlfriend Lizzie (Sophia Myles) to marry him before he went off to war and got captured. So when Nicholas McGrade (Damian Lewis) became the first "home runner" - the first British officer home from Coldtiz - he kept his promise to go to see Lizzie to tell her Jack's all right.

McGrade, however, was not a very nice chap. He reckoned he'd done his bit for the war and wanted an easy life, preferably with Lizzie. So he faked Jack's death and persuaded her to jump into bed with him.

He also got recruited by M19, a division of the secret service, where boffin Bunny Warren (West) was busy inventing ways of getting equipment into Colditz in food parcels.

War is a strange beast, an officer pointed out to McGrade. "You're devious, obnoxious, boorish, with a tendency to criminality - perfect officer material," he added.

As far as this Colditz was concerned, all wasn't fair in love and war. It was every man for himself - and his best friend's girl.

Far better than this tosh was Mr Harvey Lights A Candle, an intriguing drama starring Timothy Spall that was buried in a late-night slot on BBC1 over the weekend. Perhaps its religious overtones made the powers-that-be think it unworthy of a better place in the schedule.

Rhidian Brook's drama found Spall as a teacher whose miserable attitude caused his pupils to nickname him Mr Happy and The Incredible Sulk. The reasons for his downbeat demeanour emerged slowly during a school coach trip to Salisbury Cathedral.

Once you learnt that he was making a kind of pilgrimage to the place where he proposed to his wife 21 years previously, you realised that he had a secret. Less predictable was the fact that he would confess in front of fellow teachers and unruly pupils, or that the story would provide ample opportunity for discussion on religious tolerance and self-harm.

As fellow teacher Fran Davies (Celia Imrie) noted as the dramatics unfolded: "This is turning out to be an interesting day".

Published: 29/03/2005