Mobile, ITV1, 9pm
RUSH HOUR, BBC3, 10.30pm

Despite its overweening ambition to re-write the rule book governing how multi-part TV crime yarns unfold, Mobile's first episode succeeded in being as attention-grabbing as it was implausible; as entertainingly complex as it was, from time to time, annoyingly daft.

Part two found Mobile becoming more densely clotted as its many mobile-phone-hating murder suspects were given narrative time-lines and character-histories that zig-zagged, converged and overlapped. In its determination to tell its tale in such a non-linear way, Mobile must be saluted.

At the same time, though, I'm not entirely sure I understand all Mobile's twists and turns of plot. Naturally, I'm sure that corporate capitalism will in the end cop the blame, as it does for most evils in this world (and not just the ones depicted in multi-part TV crime yarns, brothers and sisters).

Along with Keith Allen, probably.

Confusingly for some, perhaps, Keith is the real-life father of laconic, doe-eyed, street-wise and enchanting pop popsy Lily Allen. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

Similarly, in an earlier episode in Keith's real life, while he was employed many years ago as a stage-hand at a London west end theatre, he incurred the volcanic displeasure of that lasting enemy of music and comedy, Max Bygraves. This Keith did by taking off all his clothes and sauntering out naked behind the unwitting Max when the latter was "performing" in his deadly trademark fashion. Upstaging and enraging Max Bygraves: that can only be a good thing, too.

Keith is also a good thing when it comes to portraying malevolent, sneering baddies. Keith, playing thwarted mobile-phone magnate Sir James Corson, may well eventually turn out to be Mobile's top malevolent, sneering baddy. Baddy status is not yet totally certain, however.

Sure, Sir James has the motive for murdering unsuspecting mobey-users in public, thereby starting mobey-panic and wiping millions off the share price of his old company. After all, Corsoncom was humiliatingly snatched from Sir James's control by American venture capitalists just after he'd landed a lucrative contract to create a mobile network in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the start of George'n'Tony's war on invisible bad things in countries with big oil reserves.

It was also Iraq which provided Mobile with its most lethal killing machine, a man who may - or may not - prove to be acting at Keith Allen's evil behest: stone-faced ex-soldier-turned-police-marksman Maurice Stoan.

Dead-eyed and flint-hearted, Maurice Stoan - crazy guy, crazy name! - snarls things like "I'm a soldier. I don't talk, I act" as he stalks about shooting mobey prattlers. For it was an unknown phone-user who, in answering while driving, fatally ran over Maurice's wife and child. And their unborn child. Who'd been fathered by someone else (Keith Allen?) Stoan had also been blowing up mobile-phone masts, often accompanied by his senile grandad, played by Peter Vaughan, aka Slade Prison's Mister Big in Porridge, Grouty. Grouty may yet emerge as Mobile's ultimate baddy. Mobile: it's complicated.

Lame, punchline-free sketch show Rush Hour's sole funny bit can be found on the website YouTube. It features Adam Buxton as a self-important and music-obsessed suburban dad lecturing his bored six-year-old son about gangsta rap during the morning drive to school.

Through judicious use of the car radio's volume control and his own new amended lyrics, Adam transforms NWA's angry anthem F*** Tha Police into the rather more jolly Help the Police. And so the line "They have the authority to kill a minority" becomes "They have the authority to carry out inquiries".

Man, ya hafta seek it out on the old interwebulator and watch it. It's a hoot. Unlike Rush Hour.

david.belcher@theherald.co.uk