Fraught with debt and a barnful of starving lambs Neil is so stark staring odd he makes

Fraught with debt and a barnful of starving lambs, Neil is so stark staring odd he makes David Threlfall's Smike look like Mike Aspel. This could explain Jennifer's eerie tolerance of the other characters, who keep telling her things she knows already: "This isn't London, Jennifer!" they say. "Jennifer, you are a very experienced small-animals vet." Jennifer longs to try her hand at something bigger But first she has to get past mad Neil. She is here to duplicate the Amanda Burton role in Peak Practice - a tough medic whose handsome honeyed looks go molten at the rough kiss of a woolly pully. I know Whitton's ready for a chance, but it can't take too much!" cautions one of her more enlightened colleagues Jennifer is undaunted After all, she is not here to feel things. There was still a chance that The Vet would turn out to be about a drug-crazed survivor of the Vietnam war, not a shameless retread of Herriot country. But that river burbling past the surgery door, the tempestuous yet convenient weir, could only mean one thing: spongy brain pastoralitis.

Like James at the start of All Creatures Great and Small, Jennifer (Suzanne Burden) is new to the practice and the area "Woman vet, townie, divorcee. Animals are living creatures; you, on the other hand, are a character in a drama serial desperately seeking a mass audience Right till the last minute, your critic had hopes. "I LIKE to think there's something that separates us from the animal kingdom apart from distemper and spongy brain disease," said Chris, leading man of The Vet (BBC1) Too right, honey. But Philip Langridge's Kong is well-paced, with enough voice at the end for an effectively lyrical sign-off; and Helen Field as the girl in the frame manages to project a sense of innocence at lung-emptying volume.'Ermione' (Tues & Sat) and 'Kong' (Wed & Sun): Glyndebourne, 0127 381 3813 'Ermione' will be broadcast on Channel 4, Sat 7pm.. There are major problems of balance in this score, and the conductor Elgar Howarth isn't so obviously on top of them as he was before - which makes it all a hard sing.

The diction is less clear, the audience less responsive to the genre. And the genre is late-20th- century Wagner: a grand mythology overwhelmed by an even grander orchestra. What you see is certainly engaging, but it remains a clear case of prima la musica, the musica residing in an extremely heavy orchestration, churning steadily and thickly like a molten lava flow that cakes whatever text falls in its path. In other words, surreal fun with a poignant underlay of pathos that was genuinely entertaining last time round.But this time round it doesn't work so well. The staging (Tom Cairns) is all high-tech spectacle and bristles with ironic, slightly donnish humour: everyone in the dramatis personae is dead or mythic or conceptual, and the kernel of the story is an attempted, unsurprisingly abortive love match between a celluloid gorilla and a girl in a painting. It premiered on the Glyndebourne Tour last autumn before this promotion to the Festival with much the same cast, and in a sense it is a festival piece. The idea is that these characters are playing to each other, conscious of the roles that victory and defeat respectively create.

It makes a valid point, looks stunning, and its theatricality accommodates the scale of passion that the music needs.Birtwistle's Kong is a different, hairier, animal. Discarding togas and temples, he relocates the action to the neo-classicism of the early 19th century - we might be in Ludwig I's Munich, post-Napoleonic Naples or any princeling state with epic attitude - and to a single set (Richard Hudson) that recreates the auditorium of a 19th-century opera house. And Bruce Ford, the Orestes, is an unsurpassable Ros-sini tenor: focused, firm, immaculately clear and beautiful to hear.In the pit is the LPO playing with refinement for Andrew Davis; and the production is by Graham Vick who has, these days, the certain touch of someone who can do no wrong. Diana Montague's Andromache is richly veiled in true, tragic nobility: a glorious performance.