Alias / Scrubs

With the terrestrial channels dominated by football, there's really only one place for haters of the beautiful game to find televisual solace: the satellite channels. Isn't irony great, eh?

Alias has never been short of starry guest appearances from the great and the good (Quentin Tarantino, Roger Moore, Faye Dunaway, Christian Slater, to name a few, have all popped in), so perhaps it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise that the show has managed to persuade Ricky Gervais to appear.

What is surprising, though, is just how good he is in a straight role.

When a highly complex bomb devastates a Belfast office building, the world's sexiest secret agent, Sydney Bristow is dispatched to capture its creator. Enter Mr Gervais as Daniel Ryan, former Navy bombdisposal expert turned mercenary bomb maker.

Thankfully not attempting to do an Irish accent (he sticks with his own dulcet tones), The Office star makes one hell of an impact - no pun intended - as Ryan. Beautifully bouncing off Garner's oh-so-sleek superspy, Gervais is a picture of lumpen, dead-eyed menace.

As a fiddly plot involving bluff and double bluff, deception and counterdeception winds up, he underplays everything to such chilling effect that his interrogation scenes with Garner are almost as exciting as those in which desperate agents race against time to defuse huge bombs. Red wire? Blue wire? Tick, tick, tick...

Less given to explosions (well, not the building-destroying kind, anyway) is Scrubs. Consistently one of the funniest and most inventive US comedies around, the third season of the adventures of the staff and patients at Sacred Heart Hospital wraps up tonight with a belting episode set in and around Dr Turk and Nurse Carla's wedding.

Will JD be able to patch things up with Elliott? Will Dr Cox get his wife to the service on time (hell, will Turk even make it)? And how are they going to get Rowdy the stuffed dog into a tuxedo? You will get answers to all these questions (plus the sight of a bridesmaid with one eyebrow, and a naked game of carpark golf) in one of the best half-hours of TV this week. Roll on series four.