I am watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. What is the appeal of this show?

It has lots of beautiful looking Americans. They are dealing with much more miserable stuff than most of us are, but importantly miserable. Murder is importantly miserable. Having to talk sternly to a subordinate for being a bit crap at his work is just miserable and nothing else. Having to rewrite something we thought was perfect is just miserable. We can escape to a world of important misery.

They are dealing with it, thereby reassuring us that such things are being dealt with. It is, in short, the old "trouble in paradise" formula. Paradise lost. Paradise regained by the end of each episode.

Paradise in England means looking okay, and living in a fabulously beautiful place, like Fantasy Oxford, or Fantasy Rural Village, with lots of Fantasy nice people, and Fantasy little shops selling Fantasy produce. The American equivalent is that you look Fabulous. So the CSI people are all in paradise, apart from the obligatory fat guy who makes the others look more Fabulous.

And it's all beautifully photographed. Not only do all the characters look great. It looks great. (Except that they are troubled by important misery.)

Not enough is said nowadays about how great TV looks. Watch a tennis match, or a chat show, or some idiot reality TV show. Switch the sound off. Chances are, every other shot is a Rembrandt. Does that sound daft? Maybe it's because I'm first generation TV and you aren't.

I first saw a decent modern colour TV set when I was about twelve, and it was fabulous. I can still remember the utter amazement of these magical machines. Until then, we didn't have them. Imagine watching, I don't know, test match cricket, in clunky black and white, and then seeing it in full colour. It's like seeing a colour movie for the first time, or a talkie after all you previously had had was a lunatic at an organ. You, on the other hand, grew up with colour TV, and you take it for granted. But when I was a kid, we didn't have it at all.

And CSI makes maximum use of the photographic excellence that is now possible. All those shiny, perfectly lit recreations of bullets going into bodies, of weapons slamming into bodies, of blood dripping from bodies to floors.

Above all there is William Petersen. For once we are spared the spectacle of a Man in Charge who is poised on the edge of throwing a huge temper tantrum. He seems so serene, so content, like a brain surgeon or a concert pianist, patiently going about his work with supreme calm and supreme authority. A hero for the age when yuppies have mutated into grandparents. It doesn't matter what horrors the world throw at us while he is on the watch.