Quite Ugly One Morning (ITV1); Von Trapped (ITV1): YOU couldn't hope for a more intriguing opening than the one provided by Quite Ugly One Mornng.

I don't just mean the sight of James Nesbitt in his underpants (nothing new there) as his journalist Jack Parlabane wakes from a particularly nasty nightmare and steps, trouserless, into a real one.

Hung over from a drinking binge, he staggers downstairs to investigate a strange noise that is revealed to be a mechanical toy monkey. Several other things give the game away that he's in for a bad day - the steaming, fresh turd on the mantlepiece and the sight of his landlord with his throat cut and his fingers, no longer attached to his hand, stuffed up his nose.

You might think that things couldn't get worse in this adaptation of Christopher Brookmyre's book. They did as this dark-as-coal comedy drama unfurled. Events were so bizarre that by the time Annette Crosbie's sweet old lady was murdering an incompetent hitman with a garden gnome, this seemed lke normal behaviour.

Writers can get away with this sort of thing on the page but it doesn't usually transfer well to the screen. It either seems totally ridiculous or totally offensive. Quite Ugly One Morning did it rather well, although I imagine it would have been a turn-off for more sensitive viewers. Any drama featuring a medic called Doctor Slaughter and the comic (well, I laughed) death of a dog is clearly not going to appeal to the audience that feels safe in the presence of Heartbeat.

Parlabane's clashes with the police proved particularly amusing. Only someone with the charm of Nesbitt could get away with chatting up the female sergeant while she was interrogating him about a murder. He also clashed with her superior after some verbal sparring. "You're good with words," he told the cop, "you do journalism and I'll fit people up."

Crosbie's landlady was a treat too. When Mark Benton's hitman - although his ability to hit anything was in doubt - arrived at her BandB she pointed out the arrangements in the toilet - the paper under the Spanish lady was for the use of her and husband, while the paper under the green poodle was for guests. At least she didn't tell him to return it after use.

Parlabane wasn't the only one having a dramatic weekend. As the autumn schedules kicked in on ITV!, the last (for ever, hopefully) edition of Simply The Best was relegated to the afternoon in order to serve up a feast of drama. Von Trapped was the first of three single dramas under the umbrella title of Trapped.

Like the postal service, this promised more than it delivered. The idea of a woman obsessed by The Sound Of Music seemed like a good laugh, an ideal opportunity to extract the Michael out of the sugary Julie Andrews musical. I expected something much funnier from Jonathan Harvey, writer of the outlandish Gimme Gimme Gimme and currently part of the Coronation Street writing team.

But Von Trapped was trapped in no man's land between comedy and drama, never providing satisfaction on either count. Caroline Quentin, wearing either a nun's outfit or old curtains fashioned into a dress, never seemed entirely at home as she moved from Oldham - "home of the tubular bandage" - to Saltzburg. Here, Philip Jackson's tour guide provided one of the few laughs when asked for his opinion of Julie Andrews. "She was evil, she completely misrepresented my people".