I dislike director David Lynch so I had been looking forward to getting the knives out for Twin Peaks (BBC 2, 9 p.m., Tuesday). Lynch`s films, such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and the latest, Wild at Heart, are stuffed with the cliches of what passes for avant-garde in the United States: grinding musical tracks; tricky camera angles; images of sexual disgust and the kind of whimsically inconsequential behaviour which Americans mistake for intellectual depth.

The first episode of Twin Peaks had all of these, but also managed to be  watchable in a remorseless, knee-in-the-chest kind of way. It opened to the sawing of bass cello strings and the grinding of teeth on a circular log-slicing blade. Mountain tops brooded over misty Douglas firs; there were wet roads, white picket fences and decling sawmills. This was small-town America, where nothing ever happens, so naturally it was only seconds before the first corpse appeared: the drowned body of high school queen Laura Palmer, fetchingly clad in plastic sheet and with a dab of blue lip-rouge.

Laura was 17, virginally pretty and wildly popular, so once again, under Lynch-law, it was inevitable she should be swiftly suspected of drug addiction, sexual deviancy and extortion. Clues to the murder began to pile up fast in the shape of safe deposit keys, porn magazines, cake sachets and enigmatic videos, but not so fast as fresh victims and fresh suspects.

Sheriff Harry S. Truman (yes!) spent the morning pondering ponderously while deputy sheriff Andy burst into tears over each new corpse. But riding to the rescue was clean-cut FBI agent Dale Cooper who drove into town a few hours after the murder and a few seconds after his chin, ruminating into a pocket recorder upon such rscondite matters as cherry pie and snowshoe rabbits.

Dressed like Napoleon Solo in The Man From Uncle, the FBI man talked as if he was addressing a tape recorder even when he wasn`t. Stopping the sheriff in a hallway he remarked: 'Sheriff, let me stop you here in this hallway.' Holding in his hand a small box of chocloate bunnies he commented truthfully, 'I am holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies.'

The cello strings sawed relentlessly, and the sound track was laden with the suck and click and wheeze of respiration, as if everyone in Twin Peaks had a microphone implant in their lips. And in case portentousness should ever flag, Lynch`s camera spent a lot of time inspecting banister rails, ceiling fans, traffic lights and empty corridors. Meaningless detail was loaded with false significance, and dramatic scenes were just as regularly deflated. At the tense stakeout scene Cooper asked Truman if he he knew why he was whittling a stick.

'No, why are you whittling that stick?'

'Because that`s what you do in a town where the yellow light means slow down, not speed up.'