A Touch Of Frost (ITV1)

Afterlife (ITV1)

BY the end of A Touch Of Frost, three of the leading police characters were injured and swathed in bandages. It looked more like a scene from a Mummy movie than one of TV's most popular detective series.

Getting hurt wasn't the main problem for David Jason's Inspector Jack Frost, who's irritable at the best of times. In this latest episode, he had good reason - asbestos was found at the police station and they'd been forced into temporary accommodation where, horror of horrors for food-loving Frost, there was no canteen.

Finding the killer came second to finding somewhere to have something to eat. "He hasn't had breakfast," explained sidekick DS Sharpe to the newly-arrived forensic psychologist assigned to the case by the chief constable, much to old-fashioned copper Frost's annoyance.

The profiler soon discovered the meaning of a Frosty reception. "If you want to spend money, get some more coppers," he said, showing it wasn't all right by Jack for her to be on his case.

The crime was the horrific stabbing of a mother and daughter by a masked attacker. A priest covered in blood was found at the scene and came under suspicion by Frost who wondered, "Was he giving a completely different meaning to giving her the last rites?"

The story was called Near Death Experience. ITV1's new Saturday night drama could well be called After Death Experience. You wait ages for a series about a psychic to come along and then two arrive at once. BBC1 has the US import Medium, in which Patricia Arquette sees dead people, and now Lesley Sharp has the same unearthly visions in Stephen Volk's intriguing series Afterlife.

As psychic Alison Mundy, she's trying to escape from the dead, although whether Bristol is the right place to do that is debatable. Before you can join hands and ask "Is there anybody there?", she's addressing the audience at a public sance.

"I'm not in charge, they are," she says of the dead people who appear to her. Visions of a "lavender lady" particularly upset Veronica, a student of psychology lecturer and sceptic Robert Bridge (Andrew Lincoln). It emerges that her parents entered a suicide pact to kill themselves and their children.

"We always did everything as a family," explains Veronica, the only survivor of the ordeal. As if having your parents try to kill you wasn't bad enough, she has to contend with her mother coming back from the grave to interfere in her life.

When Bridge confronts Alison, he gets more than he bargained for. She tells him she sees a little child in the corner. Later he answers the phone and hears a voice calling, "daddy, daddy".

Alison pleads "I want to lead a normal life" but you know that won't happen because there are five more episodes to go and presumably an afterlife - a second series - if the ratings are good.

"Remember what you are looking for is not always what you find," she tells Bridge in a Confuscius-he-say sort of way. What viewers of Afterlife find is a sombre, downbeat drama with lots of creaking doors, strange noises and jolting shock appearances by the deceased.

"You don't choose them, they choose you," explains Alison. The makers will be hoping viewers choose the Afterlife over what's on the other channels.