Casualty, BBC1, 8.50pm (Saturday)

The Royal, Channel, 8pm

You always get a more multi-layered and emotionally complex type of accident in Casualty, don't you? Take Saturday's example. It erupted around Jo, who'd been out shopping in a Holby retail mall but had grown distressed by the unwelcome attentions of a chap whom she perceived to be a loitering lurker. She took refuge in the mall's disability lavvy, only to find herself discomfited by the noisy arrival of a disabled woman, Maxine, who was engaged in a bitter domestic squabble with her daughter.

Jo vacated the premises and headed for the car park, reckoning she'd shaken off the apparent perv-hound, only for him to terrify her by looming all of a sudden at her car window.

In a blind panic, Jo conducted your textbook Casualty accident: reversing her vehicle, she took out Maxine. Whoomph! One accident; two victims - but who's truly the perp? Who's most to blame? Honestly, apart from ruefully muttering "Cuh, women drivers," you just didn't know what to think.

In contrast, the big accident in The Royal was all too foreseeable, all too rubbishy, just like the 1960s period medical clunker itself.

Why, as soon as you saw it, you just knew what fate would befall the ropey old motor taking the heavily pregnant woman to the maternity facility at St Aidan's Royal Free Hospital: it was bound to wind up trundling off Elsinby's northern coastal road and across a field, lightly smacking into a stone wall.

What gave the game away was the fact that the car in question was the post-war British motor industry's most unloved heap: a rust-ravaged Austin 3-Litre, evidently rescued from a scrapyard. More predictably still, you knew exactly which doctor would be tasked with delivering the pregnant woman's infant on the 3-Litre's back seat, where she lay improbably trapped (surely her breaking waters would have instantly dissolved the car's flimsy floor, thereby freeing her).

It was always going to be Dr Jill Weatherill, newly back at work after a miscarriage. Would she cope with aiding another woman's labour? By 'eck, this were Yorkshire in t'sixties; of course Dr Jill would cope, aided by t'fact that back in them days, 'appen, music were proper music. T'Beatles, for example, with Paul McCartney singing lead vocals on Yesterday.

The Royal's soundtrack also offered unknown soundalikes lamely under-performing Somebody Help Me by the Spencer Davis Group, plus a boss rhythm and blues opus featuring the line "Stop actin' crazy and sneakin' around on me" that I think was by the Pretty Things.

However, displaying a hellish insensitivity to art and the artists who suffer in making it, The Royal also utilised the Doors' druggy counter-cultural sex anthem Break On Through (To the Other Side).

In an act of posthumous sacrilege, Jim Morrison's urgent and lusty imprecations had been drafted in to spice up the less than thrilling spectacle of an elderly Bedford J1 ambulance proceeding towards the crashed Austin at a stately 28mph. That the mighty Lizard King should give his life prematurely in a Parisian hotel bath for this Not that this was the weirdest or most unsettling thing about The Royal. Heck, no. Gaze ye upon St Adrian's mopey orderly, Alun Morris, and wonder in horror how a chap with the downcast face of a fiftysomething can have sitting atop it a lustrous Merseybeat moptop that's plainly 30 years younger.

The Royal: abdicate now! Overthrow the monarchy!