If you live in Ireland or Britain and are planning your TV viewing this evening, I recommend that rather than looking at Ricky Gervais’s rather flat Extras, you catch ex-CIA Robert Baer’s programme The Cult of the Suicide Bomber on Channel 4. Last week’s programme lucidly explained how suicide bombing evolved during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon not as just as a product of religious fundamentalism (some Socialist groups without Islamic ties had their own cadres of suicide bombers, including women) but as the most effective strategy when engaged in asymmetric warfare. Baer himself is like a character from the pages of a Robert Stone novel: urbane, apparently fluent in Arabic, and seemingly unruffled by the hatred directed at the country he has served.There are not a lot of laughs in Baer’s programme, but then again, there’s not too many in Gervais’s either.