TVScope: More Than Meets the Eye BBC 1 Northern Ireland, Thursday, May 25th, 9pm
William Crawley starts his new four-part series investigating ancient traditions in Northern Ireland with a look at "traditional" medicine.
He admits from the outset that he has an instinctive trust in modern conventional medicine and is sceptical about everything else.
However, respectful sceptic that he is, he sets off to interview people who visit holy wells looking for cures.
He joins a tourist group visiting Struell Wells in Downpatrick, Co Down and lightheartedly paddles in the freezing cold water with them as they discuss whether the cure comes from the water in the well or the belief in the cure itself.
One visitor to the well who suffers from congenital cataracts tests the power of the water in the well on camera as she splashes the water up into her eyes.
Later in the programme, Crawley accompanies her to her optician who tells her that her condition has not changed.
She admits that she is a bit disappointed but had since discovered that the water wasn't fit for drinking so it would hardly have helped her eyes.
Crawley then visits St Aidan's Holy Well near Magilligan, Co Derry, which was a pagan spring of the druids in pre-Christian times.
He wonders whether the attraction to such places is because they "connect us with our ancestors or satisfy a need that modern science can't meet".
Either way, he says there is probably something deep within the human psyche that will always bring people to these places.
Crawley is a likeable presenter who interviews those seeking cures, healers and academics with the same curious open-minded approach.
He visits the Ulster Folk Museum to discuss the origins of traditional medicine and studies the archives of the Folklore Department at University College Dublin.
He includes an interesting piece of archival footage from Michael J Murphy, an Armagh man who spent half his life recording local folklore.
Crawley discovers that the Armagh Credit Union keeps a list of traditional healers and cures for people to take away with them.
A visit to a herbalist proves to shake his scepticism a little more as he gets first-hand experience of kinesiology, the muscle test that some herbalists use to select appropriate remedies for their patients.
Crawley leaves with some herbal medicine to help him sleep better. Herbalism, he says, is "the socially acceptable face of folklore".
Fitting a lot into his 25-minute programme, Crawley also visits Kenneth Stewart who has been curing warts with potatoes for more than 50 years.
A member of the TV crew neatly has his wart cured by Mr Stewart but, curiously, one appears on Crawley's neck.
Ending the programme on the sceptical note he began with, he has the wart removed by a dermatologist who weakly wonders whether there may be something in the potato that cures warts.
This reviewer was left wondering why the programme didn't go one step further and have the active ingredients of the humble potato investigated to see if there is a new wonder cream for warts waiting to be discovered.