Spooky goings on left me with a feeling of deja vu

The Boy Who Lived Before, Five

The Cult of the Suicide Bomber, Channel 4

THERE'S a sizeable audience out there wanting to be spooked, so it must be tempting for ratings-hungry television companies to conduct investigations on whether there is a paranormal explanation for baffling phenomena. In The Boy Who Lived Before, one of the subjects was Cameron, a lively five-year-old from Glasgow. His memories of a previous life on Barra developed from the age of two onwards. ("I used to be big but now I'm a kid again," he explained.) These memories included a white house on the shore, complete with another mother and father (he was named Shane Robertson, had long hair and died in a car accident), a gated path leading to a beach with rockpools, a view of aircraft taking off from the beach (Barra has the only beach airport in Britain) and a black and white dog.

But Cameron had no known connection with Barra. One expert warned of false memory syndrome, but another suggested that Cameron's story was completely atypical of that syndrome, where it is more normal for the children to acknowledge their invisible friend is imaginary. The makers took mum and Cameron from Glasgow on a trip to Barra in a quest to find the house he sees in his memories, and whether or not there was an actual Robertson family. All the details were shown to be correct, apart from the fatal accident and the name Shane.

Cameron's mother had one of those shrill high-pitched Glasgow female voices that lilt up even higher at the end of a sentence, bleaching all her words with wonderment. About Cameron's tendency to tell strangers about his other parents, she said: "He spoke so convincingly, I think they thought I'd adopted him." It sounded like she'd just discovered the theory of relativity. But it was touching to see her open-minded belief in her son. Equally it was exciting to see the uncovering of so much accuracy in his story.

The programme actively tried to spook us with the title, by under-representing the more sceptical voices and by stage-managing Cameron and his mum's entrance straight in through the open door of the empty white house on the beach, complete with blazing fire. To it's credit, though, The Boy Who Lived Before didn't try to make the evidence more conclusive than it was - for example by editing out the anomalies. But it could have gained from avoiding the sensationalistic question "can we live more than once?" and following up on recent scientific speculation that memories can get transplanted with hearts, focussing instead on ways it might be possible to absorb other people's memories, whether genetically or otherwise.

Robert Baird, the presenter of The Cult of the Suicide Bomber, wanted to find out why women become bombers in a Muslim society. He tracked the story of Nadi, a lawyer educated abroad, whose fiance and most of her family had been killed. She sat among her victims in a Haifa restaurant before detonating her bomb. According to Baird, she did it for revenge.

Another woman, Wafa, was badly burned as a protest against her parents trying to stop her becoming a martyr. She did eventually get away to enjoy her moment in the limelight, being filmed making a warlike declaration against Israel. But Wafa got caught at a checkpoint and isolated. There was some excruciating CCTV footage of her trying to blow herself up and failing. According to Baird, Wafa just wanted to be famous.

The idea of this show was to humanise these female bombers, but Baird's determination to ascribe glib motives went some way to undoing the variety of case studies he brought into play. You half expected him to say "Why go to all that bother trying to blow up families, Wafa, when you could just have entered The X-Factor?"