Doctor Who (BBC1) The Triangle (BBC1) : Excuse me while I put cotton wool in my ears to prevent my brains oozing like gazpacho from those orifices.

The dangers of watching too much TV have always been hinted at. It's well-known viewing can induce feelings of distress, anger and a compulsion to run screaming from the room (especially when Carol Vorderman appears).

But Doctor Who offered positive proof of the ill effects likely to be suffered. Surveying the set in the corner of the living room, Grandma Connolly told us: "I heard they rot your brains, rot them into soup and your brain comes pouring out of your ears. That's what television does."

She wasn't entirely correct. What actually happened was that a nice, well-spoken continuity lady called The Wire sucked the life out of viewers while muttering "Feed me, feed me". She left them faceless, giving new meaning to the expression "off your face".

Still, this was 1953 when TV was a relatively new arrival. The Doctor and Rose touched down in the Tardis on the day of the Queen's coronation, an occasion that prompted a boom in TV set sales. But every house where they landed boasted an aerial, as well as men in black rounding up and locking away faceless people.

With talk of informers and fascist states, writer Mark Gatiss may well have been drawing parallels with real life events - although not too strongly that we couldn't enjoy this as another inventive Doctor Who episode.

It's amazing how quickly David Tennant has made us forget his excellent predecessor, Christopher Eccleston, and made the Doctor his own. He and Billie Piper make a perfect couple.

A bonus in The Idiot's Lantern was Maureen Lipman sucking the life out of viewers with a cry of "I'm The Wire and will gobble you up, pretty boy".

Even Doctor Who would be hard pressed to make sense of The Triangle, a three-part mini-series - two down and one to go tonight - about... well, who knows?

It comes from Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects, two X-Men movies and the upcoming Superman Returns, and Dean Devlin, whose credits include Stargate and Independence Day.

Super-rich shipping tycoon Eric Benirall (Sam Neill) has hired a team of scientific and psychic experts to discover why he keeps losing ships in the Bermuda Triangle. Some of those aboard appear to have the life sucked out of them, although as yet there's no sign of The Wire.

Hardly a moment goes by without another strange occurrence.

A modern day airliner is attacked by wartime fighter planes; a child who survives turns into an old lady overnight; and the experts are having hallucinations. Martians and wormholes have been mentioned too. A space geek talks of "exotic matter", which may mean a trip to the local lap dancing club for all I know.

"We're not out there any more, why is it still happening to us?," asks one expert. After three hours, we're no nearer finding out.

I've nothing against a good mystery (like why the adverts are louder than the programmes) but The Triangle is posing too many questions and supplying too few answers.

I fear that sticking around for the final episode could be the thing that finally turns my brain to soup.