Regular readers of this column will be aware that I’m pretty down on Finnish telly in general. This isn’t only because it is almost all pants, although it is, but because the schedules are filled with either a) terrible shock-docs, b) very poor Finnish variants of American reality or light entertainment shows, c) laughably amateur Finnish productions and soap operas, and d) the news, which means we end up never watching anything which might actually tell us something about anything, or even, dare I say it, educate us. I’ve nothing against being entertained per se, but I do resent my viewing desires being interpreted, by people who have no idea what they’re doing, as involving re-runs of American Gladiators from 1989. I want investigation, I want truth, I don’t want X-Factor.

But I’ve pretty much given up my lofty pretensions of expecting or even desiring edification from my telly. Beyond the simple truth that humans are idiots – a theorem first proved beyond all reasonable doubt in the first season of Big Brother years ago – I reckon we’ve pretty much come to the end of the TV as a medium of instruction. With recognition comes freedom, apparently, and while casting my normally-jaundiced eye over the upcoming schedules I must admit I’ve noticed a few shows where I’m happy to set my brain onto ‘freeze’. Hercule Poirot (TV1), for a start, is back on our screens this week. Whoever is in charge of digging up old stuff that YLE still have the rights to must have inadvertently found something good. Consider your detective needs satiated at eight minutes past five every day, repeated at ten past eleven the following morning.

Hugh Laurie has seemingly been recognised as one of the few stand-out stars of the current broadcasting zeitgeist. The new season of House starts Thursday 11th at 21:00 weekly (MTV3). Laurie’s justly famous misanthropic medicine man hasn’t changed that much over the years, other than a general decline into drug addiction, distrust and sardonicism, but he’s still one of the more interesting characters on our screens. Jumping on the bandwagon somewhat, YLE have decided to show yet another re-run of a British classic which just happens to also star Hugh Laurie: Jeeves & Wooster (Sundays 12:15, TV1). It’s hard to imagine a show better suited to Sunday afternoon lounging, nor a show which is so perfectly in tune with its source material.

Finally, at least for the good stuff, MTV3 are showing on Mondays a relatively recent series called Lie to Me at 21:00. I admit this one slipped off my radar, or rather never appeared on it, but perhaps that’s because MTV3 have been too busy promoting their extensive array of rubbish shows all over the place that all the vaguely interesting stuff never gets noticed. Lie to Me stars Tim Roth as psychologist Cal Lightman who is an expert in body language and deception. Shades of The Mentalist are pretty obvious, but here’s another Brit making in-roads into the American TV market. And let’s face it, Roth can act. So I guess this’ll have to do while I’m waiting for a hard-hitting documentary exposing corruption in the highest levels of Finnish government and industry, won’t it?

NICK BARLOW