LEFT HIGH AND DRY BY TRIANGLE TALK

CONFUSED? I certainly was by my viewing choices over the bank holiday weekend.

The main cause of my aching brain and the puzzled expression on my face by Tuesday morning was the BBC1 drama The Triangle, which was shown in three parts on Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights.

It was to be expected that a drama based on the enigma of the Bermuda Triangle should exercise the brain cells, but was I the only person suffering from pseudo-scientific theory overload by the time the final credits rolled?

Along with the thousands of ships and planes that have gone missing in the area, my powers of concentration and deduction went AWOL at regular intervals through the televisual marathon (a situation not helped by missing 20 minutes of the crucial third episode!).

I still can't tell you why Greenpeace activist Mino (Lou Diamond Phillips) found himself with a two-year-old son who existed, then didn't, then existed again by the end of the drama.

Neither can I explain why six-year-old Heather, who was rescued from a plane crash in the Triangle, aged about 60 years in a couple of hours.

Or why a group of supposedly intelligent people would repeatedly fly or sail right to the centre of the fateful stretch of water in search of answers. It could, of course, have been the five million dollars they had each been offered by Sam Neil's powerful shipping magnate character to solve the mystery!

It all started so well, with Christopher Columbus and his three tiny sailing ships being seriously spooked by the sudden appearance of a monster modern day cargo vessel, as they negotiated the seas in the Triangle back in 1492.

So far, so good - after all, we are all experts on time travel now, thanks to Doctor Who.

By the time the second episode started, however, I was already starting to wish the scriptwriters had signed up to the Plain English Campaign. And, where a few answers were needed to keep interest fresh, all we received were more questions and a lot more science!

Bryan Singer, of X-Men fame, was involved in this production and it showed, with special effects of Hollywood blockbuster quality. Looking good is only part of the equation of a top drawer drama, however, with a large element of the rest of it being the small matter of making sure the viewer has some chance of making sense of it all.

In the same vein, what on earth was going on during the first night of the wormhole that is ITV1's The X Factor: Battle of the Stars? What possible reason - scientific or otherwise - can there be for James Hewitt and Rebecca Loos surviving the launch show?

Apart from the fact that neither qualifies as a 'star', it is a mystery to me how anyone could have actually voted to keep this pair of nonentities in the competition? It can't have been anything to do with vocal talent, as the couple ruthlessly murdered Addicted To Love. Surely Money For Nothing would have been more appropriate?