Bible code is pure tosh - get the message?

C4, 11.15pm

There ought to be a law against people who persist in predicting the end of the world. Like nuisance phone callers, albeit on a somewhat grander scale, they should be treated as menaces of polite society. Then again, there should probably also be a law against ''science'' programmes that take gluttons for eternal punishment seriously.

Michael Drosnin takes

particular care, it almost

goes without saying, to avoid claiming that the dire warnings he believes are encoded in the Bible will necessarily come to pass. Last year's collapse of the world economy - what do you mean, you missed it? - followed by

the present unrest, will not inevitably lead, he concedes, to an atomic holocaust. But you sensed that he will be a bit miffed if 2006 is marked only by a few light showers.

Drosnin's Bible, clearly not the Good News version, has yielded up lots of apocalyptic stuff thanks to an analysis

of ''equal distance skip sequences'' developed by one Professor Eliyahu Rips. JFK's death; Clinton's election;

the moon landings; the Oklahoma bombing; Watergate: 3000 years ago, scribes must have had nothing better to do than post enigmatic text messages on the divine database.

Quite why they didn't just say what was on their minds was not clear, but neither was Horizon's reasons for ''investigating'' the amazing idea that the letters, in a big chunk of words, might just form other words if they're suitably rearranged. As the narration suggested, either Drosnin has ''stumbled on one of the most important discoveries ever made, or he, and the millions of people who take him seriously, have got it badly wrong''.

Guess which it is. Guess, too, at the number of times ''millions of people'' have got things wrong. And guess

how the millions watching Horizon felt when the programme finally called in some folk from Imperial College, London to test the Rips method. There is, said an eminently sane woman, ''absolutely no evidence at

all that there are hidden codes'' in the early books

of the Bible.

Instead, we were left with

a matter of belief and the opportunity to wonder what belief has to do with science, or with science programmes. For my part, I put my trust in the Australian statistician who found ''evidence'' of the Kennedy assassination in the pages of Moby Dick. Just to be on the safe side, though, I've encoded a warning in the preceding text. Read every ninth word backwards in a mirror under water and you'll find that it spells out the words: ''Insulting tosh''.

Forbidden Fruit, meanwhile, has the makings of a decent social history series disguised as soft porn, or vice versa. The historians were on hand to demonstrate that the history of interracial sex is entangled in the brutalities of slavery and colonialism. The director, clearly a man of few words, was more interested in flesh tones. An important story trivialised, in short.