Fooling Hitler (ITV1); The Fight (BBC2); The Minoans (C4): A MAN was stuffing an explosive device up the back passage of a dead rat, while novelist Dennis Wheatley was advocating the deployment of trumpet-carrying women on horseback about the countryside.

Amazingly, these were the sort of things that helped us win the war, as Fooling Hitler showed the British were deadly serious about the trickery and deception that played a key part in the war effort.

It began simply enough by removing road signs to fool the enemy in case we were invaded. This was a real possibility after taking "a hell of a beating" at Dunkirk and our forces needed time to recover.

This dramatised documentary showed how a team of mavericks, including actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr and claret-drinking Wheatley, invented all manner of trickery that saved thousands of lives on D-Day and helped win the war.

It was not without humour, like the time the Germans dropped wooden bombs having sussed the Brits' decoy airfield of canvas planes. The boffins' workshops resembled the scene in the Bond movies where Q shows 007 the latest gadgets. Here they included exploding rats and Wheatley's suggestion of horsewomen to maintain communication in an emergency.

The Germans were fed false information, from dodgy weather reports to letters in newspapers in which a vicar complained about the number of condoms left around a US base - one that didn't exist but hopefully led the enemy to concentrate in the wrong area.

Another type of fighting - boxing - features in the four-part series The Fight, which opened with the bad boys of the ring, from 19th century bare-knuckle champion John L Sullivan to Mike Tyson. The rules back in 1889 meant fights continued until one man went down. One of Sullivan's fights lasted a bruising 75 rounds over two-and-a-quarter hours in blistering heat.

This was all fascinating stuff, even for those of us who wouldn't dream of watching boxing unless Sylvester Stallone was in the ring. Jack Dempsey went from teenage vagrant to world champion. He stood trial for draft evasion and was acquitted. He became an actor in Hollywood in the 1920s despite the fact that "he couldn't act his way to the bar to ask for a drink".

Tyson's story mirrored Dempsey's in the way he used boxing to escape crime and poverty. By the time Tyson, who'd served three years in prison for rape, fought Lennox Lewis, he was no longer Tyson the boxer, but Tyson the maniac. Lying on his back having been floored by Lewis, he looked like a man who'd had enough and didn't want to get up.

Much easier on the eye than hulking great boxers is historian Bettany Hughes, seen wandering Cretan ruins in a series of summer outfits and telling us the "mythical cock and bull" story of The Minoans.

The Greek myth of the queen seduced by a bull offered a neat twist on the wooden horse of Troy. The wife of Minos fancied a white bull, a gift from the gods. She crawled into a hollow cow on wheels left in a field and "interviewed" the bull. The result was the birth of the minotaur, a creature with the body of the man and head and horns of a bull.

Now that's a story that even soap writers haven't dared to copy yet.

Published: 25/10/2004