by Paul Bradley 

The Jury: Murder Trial, Channel 4, Monday, 9pm

The Traitors Ireland, RTE1, Sunday, 9.30pm

Atomic, Sky Atlantic, Thursday, 9pm

Dolphins – Wonders Of The Ocean, RTE1, Sunday, 6.30pm

I wasn’t sure Channel 4 could bring back The Jury: Murder Trial after a successful first season that revealed so much of what went on that I didn’t think many people would be keen to tackle it. Silly me: there are always people willing to undergo all sorts just to get on reality TV. That includes being part of the “real jury” deciding on a staged trial which is a fictionalised version of an actual case. The arguments are scripted and performed by actors in a real court, but the jury’s reactions and debates are completely genuine.

This time, the case revolved around Sophie, accused of murdering her boyfriend. She claimed it was self-defence – that he was strangling her when she grabbed the knife – and he did have a dodgy, vaguely violent pattern of behaviour that would back that up, right down to CCTV footage of him apparently throwing her to the ground.

But hard facts were scant, and Sophie’s own story was riddled with lies.

Meanwhile, two experts disagreed on how responsible she was for her boyfriend’s death – how can a jury of 12 untrained people get to the bottom of it?

Well, with some difficulty and considerable squabbling, that’s how. Their behind-the-scenes debates are sometimes frustrating, but their individual reactions in and out of the court, as evidence shifts one way and another, are genuinely absorbing. It makes for heavy viewing, but it’s fascinating, although I wasn’t completely sure why, when the verdict was finally revealed and compared to the verdict on the actual case, there were so many tears.

And actually, that heightened emotion was a problem all the way through. If anything the show only solidified the argument for getting rid of juries altogether. Instead of focusing dispassionately on the facts presented, there were personal attacks, big egos, and judgements stupidly announced before all the evidence was even in. Too many judgements were about what the person felt, rather than what the legal question was, and frankly, if two actual experts disagree firmly on the suspect’s culpability, it’s hard to see how any verdict can possibly be beyond reasonable doubt. Even some of the jurors themselves, after the emotions had died down, had big doubts about the jury system.

THE TRAITORS IRELAND

Actually The Jury taps in, in a more compelling way, into some of the same dynamics – the vagaries of human behaviour, the unreasonableness of so much human conversation – that work in The Traitors, which has just begun its first Irish series. You know the gist by now, though of course this is closer to home than usual. Here we have Siobhan McSweeney as our host, as 24 players meet at Slane Castle to complete various missions and chase a potential prize of €50,000. Contestants are eliminated round by round, with some secret Traitors, who can “murder” other members in their group; and there are the Faithful, who must eliminate the Traitors.

For a while it’s fun – McSweeey is all dressed up as the sly, stern mammy, and as the contestants are Irish there’s instant chat among them (no doubt trying to figure out if they all know the same people, though RTE’s recoding wasn’t always that clear). But while it’s more entertaining than most reality TV shows, it still has fundamental flaws I just can’t get past. One way or another, it’s too manufactured. Partly that’s in the ominous music, so overdone that it just reminds me it really is just a game, nobody is actually being murdered; partly it’s that word “murder” when it comes to a Traitor eliminating someone from the game, but it’s just called “banishing” when the Faithful do the same thing. Mostly, though, it’s that the missions often serve no real purpose, and the Traitors don’t act any differently just because they are Traitors: it’s in everyone’s interests to just work together as normal. So when it comes to the Faithful figuring out who’s a Traitor, there are no intriguing plots to untangle. It’s just guesswork, at least in the early stages (when it doesn’t matter anyway because an eliminated Traitor will just be replaced by another); in too many ways it’s just drawing names out of a hat, but with a whole lot more faff. (Oh, and by the way, if you’re watching, why don’t you buy this pricy car – we’re sponsoring it, you know?)

ATOMIC

If it’s hard finding someone to trust in a jury, spare a thought for poor Alfie Allen in Atomic, in which he plays Max, a non-violent driver pushed by a drugs cartel into smuggling all sorts across dangerous borders, while various factions give chase.

As we meet him he’s driving across the Algerian desert with a tacit companion called Carlo, on their way to exchange cash and coke for a pair of strange antique statues.

Soon – and I’m not giving spoilers away here – Max finds himself with a surprise new partner, the unreadable JJ (Shazad Latif). But they’re still being chased by dangerous groups they may or may not know; and why do the two statues they are collecting have to be kept two metres apart at all times?

I tuned in expecting a big blokeish adventure, and in some ways it is just that – it’s far from subtle as it bounces along from one twist to the next, from one glowering villain to another.

But despite looking as if it’s about to become terribly laddish and self-aware, it never quite does so – the dominant tone is mostly serious, and kudos to Allen and Latif in particular for keeping their characters believable (and I suspect the writers had some fun trowelling in some Scottish swearwords you don’t normally hear on telly). Meanwhile, the pace is fast enough that you don’t have time to analyse it, and the plot is unpredictable – so it probably won’t be one you actually care about, but it’s still more entertaining and more gritty than its early publicity suggested.

DOLPINS – WONDERS OF THE OCEAN

Right. RTE’s new Sunday teatime series is both more handsome and more interesting than selling tea in Kylemore Abbey. It’s also only two parts, though in a way that’s surprising since it took about 20 years to film: Dolphins – Wonders Of The Ocean is the work of cameraman Ken O’Sullivan, and it’s his story of a fascination with the animals, going back to an encounter with one dolphin in Clare (where he lives) and extending into a look at, inevitably, the many ways in which we are threatening their existence.

There are some nice little individual stories too – like the dolphin who was called Dusty because she showed up off the cliffs of Moher just weeks after Dusty Springfield’s dying wish was to have her ashes scattered there. Mostly it’s a careful personal look at the creatures as they visit our coast – but it’s also nicely unsentimental about their lives in the wild, telling us they’re not the smiling playthings we imagine. And some of the photography, I must say, is extraordinarily intimate and patient.