At Home With The Eubanks (five)

Hidden Treasure (BBC2)

YOU don't have to be mad to star in your own TV reality show, but it helps. Ozzy Osbourne and his family proved that - and now snappily-dressed boxer Chris Eubank shares the secrets of his home life with viewers.

See him iron a pair of trousers! See him lose the key to his wardrobe! See him take his long-suffering wife Karron (whose name he steadfastly refused to pronounce correctly) to Paris!

"Do you have to take your stick with you?," she asked him.

"It's a cane," he replied, correcting her.

With four children and a husband who counts as a fifth judging by his behaviour, Karron clearly needs the patience of a saint. As daughter Emily, only nine but displaying remarkable insight, said of her famous father: "Sometimes he can be funny and annoying at the same time".

The problem with reality shows now is that, as we get used to the makers' tricks and ruses, it all seems less and less real and more and more staged. "I'm not a showoff, I'm a showman," Eubank protested. Either way, he looks as though he's playing to the cameras.

Once you've got past Eubank's way of speaking and dress sense, there's not much else to support a fly-on-the-wall series, although a subject who quotes both Shakespeare and Nelson Mandela is unusual. So is an attempt to make people who go metal detecting interesting. This isn't an all-action activity, more like watching paint dry than anything else. Hidden Treasure presenter Miranda Krestovnikoff has a wonderful name and an enthusiasm that didn't convert me to the cause of metal detectives. Still, it's not every day you find a goddess, as Alan Meeks did when he made "an astonishing discovery" just inches below the surface of a field in Hertfordshire.

This was the type of find of which every metal detective dreams - a hoard of gold and silver plaques, jewellery and a mysterious figurine.

Volunteers searched the field and found more Roman bits and pieces, as Miranda and her experts tried to establish if a temple was once on the site. The place did prove to be connected to a goddess, Senva, and one that hadn't been recorded before.

The wet weather did its best (worst?) to dampen their spirits, but modern equipment was used to read inscriptions and plot an underground map of the area.

Alan, meanwhile, let us in on the secrets of metal detectives. The mind wanders while searching, he admitted. "What do you think about?", asked Miranda.

"Holidays, sex..." replied Alan, although Miranda wisely decided not to press him for details. He didn't go home empty-handed. As his find contained more than ten per cent gold, it was officially classified as treasure. He received, after some negotiation, £35,000. Perhaps metal detection isn't quite so unrewarding as I first thought.

The Roy Orbison Story, Darlington Civic Theatre.

FOR the baby boomers who packed the Civic Theatre, this was a celebration of the music that accompanied their youth. Roy Orbison was the voice of the broken-hearted, the abandoned lover, and every teen in the swinging sixties could relate to the trembling emotion in his voice in songs like Crying and It's Over.

Orbison's private life was touched with tragedy: his young wife Claudette was killed in a motorcycle accident only six weeks after the couple remarried, and two of his children died in a house fire. So the pale-faced Texan in dark glasses remained something of an enigma, standing stock-still at the microphone and delivering his dramatic songs in that extraordinary three-octave voice.

Damien Edwards captures the voice magnificently, reaching those killer top notes with no problem at all and even pulling off the tremulous quality that tugged at the world's heartstrings.

While the music plays, everything is fine. And there's plenty of music; some 30-odd numbers with 'guest stars' including Patsy Klein, the Everly Brothers, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen. The bits in between that move the story on are a bit slow, but there's so much to enjoy in this show that you can forgive any overacting and patchy American accents.

There are nice caricatures of George Harrison and Mick Jagger from Andy Pelos, and the entire company is very versatile and hard-working. But it's Damien Edwards, of course, who dominates the evening as Orbison, the gentle, diffident singer/songwriter who died in 1988, much too soon. This evening is a fitting tribute.

Sue Heath

l Runs until Saturday. Box office: (01325) 486555