Emmerdale, ITV1, 7pm
What About Brian, E4, 9pm

In a bargain hour-long special edition - watching it felt twice as long - Emmerdale focused on a botched robbery at a bookmaker's. This incident climaxed in fraternal bloodshed and a curious revelation: the ancient serial has gone stone mad. Or maybe it's been like this for ages and I haven't noticed.

For I'll confess that many aeons have passed since I last put on me flat 'at, sithee, and ventured to Soapworld's curious northern upland outpost to sip 'alf-pint o' dark mild in t'Woolpack. All I seem to have missed is mind-bending confusion. Bafflingly, these days in Emmerdale every third character is a serio-comic nogoodnik surnamed Dingle.

Cop for this load of Dingles: Marlon, Eli, Debbie, Zak, Lisa, Dingle and Sam Dingle. There's even a royal one by marriage: Donna Windsor-Dingle.

This Dingle-mania is plain wrong, d'y'hear me, wrong! Whatever happened to the old Emmerdale wherein every character was a whiskery old buffer with a Biblical Yorkshire name such as Jedediah Thornthwhistle, Meshach Crupperthwaite or Abednego Osmondthorpe?

Thankfully, this noble tradition is upheld by the one Dingle I've not mentioned, Shadrach of that ilk. Shadrach and Sam Dingle provided Emmerdale's cheery knockabout skullduggery, supplying a foolish woman with a goat.

The foolish woman accepted Shadrach and Sam's goat with minimal inquiry and then asked a more agriculturally-literate local to inspect her purchase. 'Ecky thump, yon foolish woman'll not be starting up her goat-milk business wi' a billy goat, tha knows.

At the other end of the crime scale, Marlon and Eli Dingle were staging a daring raid on the bookies. Part-way through, Marlon was overcome by a fit of moral revulsion when Eli whipped out a gun.

Eli having entered the bookies alone, an anxious Marlon just had to leave the duo's getaway car and go in to see what was happening, entering just as his gat-toting brother was threatening the manager and a customer.

So Marlon dived for the shooter. In the ensuing bungled Dingle tangle, there was a mis-angled bang. Now there's a mangled Dingle dangling 'twixt life and death in a pool of blood.

Has Eli gone too far? When Emmerdale's creators called one of their characters Bob Hope did they just not know there used to be another Bob Hope? Should Alex Salmond insist that if Scotland has to endure Emmerdale, England should be legally compelled to sample our own much better River City?

When it comes to soapy nonsense, the Americans do it so much better, although they seem to have missed an obvious trick with What About Brian. How much zippier it would have been if they'd called it What About Brad, or What About Quint. But Brian it is, Brian being a hunky dude who wanders about having intense feelings all the time. All the other folk in the show have intense feelings all the time, too. These feelings compel them to get involved with each other in intense ways at very awkward times - "The night before our wedding!" - which provokes further intense feelings ("I'm trying! Ya gotta meet me haff-way!").

Yup: everybody in What About Brian feels intensely, complicatedly conflicted about their feelings ("Why did you say We didn't have sex' like you could have had sex?"). What redeems the show is its lovely houses - built on stilts and perched on scenic California hillsides - and its neat soundtrack.

Last night's musical rippers included Beth Orton's Safe in Your Arms and Time Bomb by Old 97's.

Indeed, your evening would have been more profitably spent with the TV off, listening to Old 97's greatest hits album, Hit By a Train, instead of being clobbered by Emmerdale.