Star Trek Story (BBC2, Monday). Star Trekkers (BBC2, Monday). Funk It Up Scotty (BBC2, Monday). The Bite (BBC1, Saturday, Sunday). The Carpenters - Yesterday Once More (BBC1, Sunday).

SOME time in the 1960s. A poor home in the project, ghettoland. The young Whoopi Goldberg turns on the television to find a science fiction show. Shocked, she screams for her family: ``Come quick: there's a black lady on television. AND SHE'S NOT A MAID.'' Forget the swaggeringly porcine James T Kirk, forget the logic-obsessed changeling Spock and, please, let us forget the world's most famous Scotsman, Scotty. The member of the USS Enterprise crew destined for immortality is Lieutenant Uhura, aka Nichelle Nichols. As Martin Luther King himself told her, Uhura changed the face of television for ever.

Many and grandiose were the claims made in Star Trek Story (BBC2, Monday). Some read the series as a cipher of American history, with Kirk as Kennedy and Star Fleet as the Peace Corps in outer space. The sociologically-inclined wax pretentious about how late-twentieth-century Trekkies have transformed packaged entertainment into genuine folk culture. There is a monastery in New Mexico where you can go to learn to be Klingon from the inside. For many, it seems, Star Trek is a way of life. One of the jurors in the Whitewater trial walked into court in full Enterprise uniform, explaining to the world's media that ``the ideals of Trek are the ideals that I live by''. (The judge dismissed her.) The series has even spawned a sub-genre of pulp fiction known as Slash, in which Kirk and Spock spice their homosexual romance with a touch

of transvestism.

Spock in a frock may be taking things too far, but Star Trek certainly made sexual waves. In Star Trekkers (BBC2, Monday) Paul Boateng MP recalled how, as a schoolboy hungry for positive black images - and ``massive expanses of thigh'' - he idolised the ultra-competent communications officer Uhura. He still thrills at the memory of that taboo-busting snog between Kirk (exposing a little too much prime gammon in plastic laurel wreath and toga) and the black lieutenant. What a way to make history.

Strange that so much social significance should have emanated from the typewriter of Gene Roddenberry, former LAPD officer and Pan-Am pilot. Roddenberry was the sort of feminist who regarded women as ``equals in miniskirts'', a man who was never too busy to redesign a costume. And for Gene, less was more. Yet there on screen was a Unitarian minister predicting that future generations would revere Roddenberry alongside Homer.

Somehow I don't think so. Which is not to underestimate the alchemy involved in creating the series. Look at what (or who) he had to work with. Kirk might not have been the last word in dignity but he was positively Gandhian compared with William Shatner hamming his way through a spoken version of How to Handle a Woman on Funk It Up Scotty (BBC2, Monday). Leonard Nimoy was little better. As the unemotional Mr Spock, he stirred the perverse passions of many a female fan. Minus those ears, he turned out to be the acme of uncool, cavorting around the beach singing the praises of Bilbo Baggins, ``the greatest little Hobbit of them all''.

Samira was a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor school of glamour, a scarlet-lipsticked siren who prefaced every utterance with ``dahlink'' and signalled her intentions towards her girlfriends' husbands by dinking them lightly in the groin with a red stiletto heel. She also happened to be a drug smuggler who, in cahoots with husband Bambi, lured previously law-abiding citizens into acting as couriers. There was plenty

of schlock in The Bite (BBC1,

Saturday, Sunday): the

newlyweds-turned-undercover-police-agents premise of the plot, the Burmese package holiday footage of bamboo curtains and exotic street food, the climatic courtroom scene with its declaration of love from the witness box. But the tension was ratcheted so relentlessly that there was no time to care.

Invited to join the smuggling ring, Jack and Ellie Shannon (Hugo Weaving and Lesley Manville) went straight to the Australian police. Before long Jack was walking around with his Y-fronts bugged so he could tape the conversation at Bambi's dinner table. Given Samira's predilections, it did not seem the most sensible hiding place, but the plan went smoothly enough until his cassette recorder beeped. From that point it was one disaster after another. Jack was arrested by the Burmese police and subjected to an interrogation with a twist (they hit him every time he spoke). Then it was Ellie's turn. She was held at gunpoint, threatened with ordeal by laxative and disembowelling by flick-knife, and finally, suffering from terminal boredom under the witness protection programme, she slit her own wrists. The bodyguards found her in time, saving her for an encounter with a pistol-packing public school hitman on a rapidly-sinking boat. Luckily she found the harpoon......

They were dubbed the ``toothsome twosome'' and ``goody four shoes''. Nixon hailed them as the ideal example of American youth. They had a string of hits, and scooped music biz awards from under the noses of the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and the Jackson Five. But the all-American boy-next-door was stoned on Quaaludes and the all-American girl starved herself to death. Clearly there was more to Richard and Karen Carpenter than met the eye. Also, disappointingly, more than made it to the screen in The Carpenters - Yesterday Once More (BBC1, Sunday). Hamstrung by the need to secure the co-operation of the living (and, doubtless, by the laws of defamation), the film-makers had to rely on candy colours, satirical soft focus and footage of Richard and Karen hand-in-hand with Mickey and Minnie at Disneyland to make their subversive point.

Two decades on, Richard Carpenter had turned into a faintly donnish figure, the sort of man who wore knee socks under his slacks so that, even with his legs crossed, there was no immodest glimpse of shin. Karen remained a frustratingly elusive presence: a gleaming fringe, a painfully stretched smile, the desperate gaiety of those raisin-dark eyes and, of course, the voice that Burt Bacharach described as ``clean, clear, like a flag flying over the song.......just about perfect''.

The P-word popped up so often in this documentary that it was a relief to hear Maria Luisa Galeazzi, Karen's personal assistant, cut through the misty-eyed tributes with some honest to goodness acid. (Though she did have an affair with Richard, which cast something of a shadow over her claims to sound judgment.) ``I don't know why Karen was unhappy. She had money, she had stardom, she could have had any guy in town, she was cute, she had a sharp sense of humour, she was intelligent, she was talented - God, what more do you want?''

Presumably Karen Carpenter could have told us, but no-one else was about to. ``Karen was honest, was caring, and was.......'' here her brother lapsed into several seconds of eloquent silence ``clearly gifted and.......ultimately troubled.'' But troubled by what? Relatives and colleagues offered only bizarre and mystifying euphemism. After Karen's death Richard Carpenter married his cousin.