Clive James on the week's TV: Mayday, Spiral, Black Mirror Charlie Brooker has been kind to me in print, so I must be careful not to be too kind about him, lest people suspect that I am dishing out a quid pro quo. On the downside, his weekly show behind a desk (Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, BBC Two) sometimes makes it look as though he wants to eat the desk in his anger at the world. But his larger dramatic creations reveal a Swiftian intelligence that is quite unusual when translated into an updated, high tech, electronic (squrrk!) field. There is quite a lot of squrrk! in Black Mirror. He wants you to know that your attention is being zapped into lightning trips from one field of reality to another. The main reality in the latest show seemed to be that a helpless young woman was on the run from dozens of zombie-type vigilantes: shades of A Clockwork Orange, Assault on Precinct 13, etc. But (squrrk!) not so fast. Towards the end it turns out that she is really the victim of a deadly game. With her wiped brain - Brooker is fond of the idea of the human mind being annihilated by television - she is being made to experience the suffering she caused when she tortured a child. But did she? Are the organizers of the game (see, as Brooker undoubtedly has, The Game, with Michael Douglas) normal people like us, at last getting the chance to inflict a just punishment that the psycho criminal will actually feel? Or what? Doubts remain as the soundtrack says squrrk! Brooker used to be a companion at arms for Chris Morris but it is starting to look as if he, Brooker, has a scope all his own, and more powerful for being less parodic. He doesn't just make fun of television, which even I can do. He can see the fractures in life itself, as Swift could. On top of that he has the great virtue of having seen everything and yet not being derivative. His desk-eating savagery is too heartfelt for that. A whole new area of sci-bull opened up with The Core (repeated on BBC Four), which introduced us to the South Atlantic Anomaly. From global warming, which seems to be no longer in fashion, the language of artificial disaster (always a prime component of sci-bull) has been transferred intact to this new phenomenon. The Anomaly is "a perfect storm under the South Atlantic." The Anomaly "could deepen and spread." The "tipping point" could happen any time between the next "thousand to ten thousand years." Well, I've consulted my diary and I'm afraid I can't be here to see the South Atlantic Anomaly come bursting through. But I'm here to tell you that after living all the way through the period when the Earth was threatened by a new Ice Age, and then the period when it was threatened with death by heat, I've got a deep suspicion - almost as deep as the Anomaly is, storming away perfectly under the Atlantic - that this scare, too, might be a popularity play by second-rate scientists in search of subsidies and tenure. The most thrilling thriller on television right now, the fourth season of Spiral (BBC Four) would not work if the baddies were alone in being stupid, for then there would be no drama. Luckily, the goodies are stupid too. The two most hard-bitten cops in Laure's squad, Gilou and Tintin, spend most episodes proving that there is no task they can't screw up either together or separately, like Laurel and Hardy. But they are not without competition from their own colleagues for the title of most dim-witted flic. In fact I'm even starting to have my doubts about the supposedly marvellous Laure. Why does almost every stakeout she organizes go so wrong? It isn't just because of interference from her bone-headed boss. Even when all the planning is in her hands, somehow the raid on the safe house of the villains ends up with the key villain getting away and Laure chasing after him. She must be able to run like Jessica Ennis, or perhaps he has been smoking too much hemp. Anyway, after a chase lasting a full five minutes she catches up with him. But your suspicions are already fully aroused. Is Laure, despite all the publicity, really the cop you want on the key case against the men of terror? Imagine, however, being stuck with Tintin and Gilou. Merde.