EastEnders continued apace, with poor old Billy at the mercy of his father-in-law as everybody seemed to be making the decisions about his daughter’s future around and for him- apart from underlining just how awkward Barbara Windsor is at straight acting, the storyline provided a genuinely disturbing cliffhanger, as the always-slightly-unnerving Honey said out loud that the best thing for their child and for the rest of the family would be for it to die. I fear for the child, not because of the Down’s syndrome or because of the heart problem, but purely because they haven’t shown a baby on screen yet. While we aren’t exactly talking Tom Cruise secrecy here, and it’s almost certainly impossible to get hold of a Down’s syndrome baby just for the purposes of filming a few scenes, a healthy soap baby would have been cuddled and played with by now. Elsewhere the poor little rich girl/moneygrabbing potential boyfriend plot moved on a step, with the girl getting him a job in her nightclub and the local greasy spoon providing the venue for some serious smalltalk. If it wasn’t a totally compelling episode, I suspect it’s because the midweek episodes are there to keep the plot going and the ongoing story will pick up tomorrow.

The subject of vets- particularly young female ones- is a vexed one for me, because one of them was my most serious girlfriend ever. She’s fourteen years in the past, though, and fortunately not the subject of Vet Safari, in which a young English vet who relocated to South Africa went around anaesthetising giraffes, wildebeest et al, accompanied by her South African husband. You don’t have to be crackers to like in the Southern Hemisphere but it helps- I think all that sunlight brings out the eccentricity in people. They even had to blindfold one of the giraffes, although that may have been to spare him the sight of the reanimated corpses of Esther Rantzen and Lynn Faulds Wood stalking the Earth in with cleavages like tree bark in Old Dogs, New Tricks . The ladies in question may well be experienced and hard-bitten consumer champions, but twenty years of it have made them so well known that all their investigation has to be done by hidden camera filming and infiltrators- in this case, in a timeshare company whose offices looked like, well, The Office- such is life imitating art. In common with Rogue Traders, the emphasis was on the deception and the secret filming, with a disappointing lack of emphasis on the follow-up, exaclty what laws had been broken and what a consumer’s rights would be when deceived in this way. The net effect is to sensationalise the crime without a proper impression of justice being done or giving useful consumer information- these are naughty boys, we show them up and that’s it- we leave the authorities to do the boring stuff.

By contrast, Aberfan-The Untold Story was a complicated and anguished tale of the 1966 disaster which left over 100 schoolchildren dead and scarred a close-knit Welsh mining community. The ethics of the film-makers were a little muddied at times, using day-for-night filming of modern Aberfan to represent the village in 1966 (with a clearly visible modern bus in the street) and mixing footage and photos of the people involved with the actors playing those people and the individuals themselves interviewed in 2006. But the story is a heart-rending one; not merely for the loss of some 150 adults and children, but for a community which had to live with the question of exactly what was known about the spring which undermined the spoil heap and led to the tragedy, and whether some individuals didn’t place keeping the pit open and their jobs intact above the safety of the village. The interviews with the survivors were sensitive; not only was it striking to see them still living in Aberfan, but it’s sobering to think that those who survived as children are only just starting to turn fifty and may have another thirty years of grieving. Whether the Wilson government and the National Coal Board did in fact try to cover up the causes of the disaster, and to what extent anybody can be said to be to blame are trivialities beside the human cost of something which has started to slip out to the fringes of our national consciousness, and therefore exactly the kind of event which needs to be brought back to mind every so often.

And so my final evening’s viewing began with that old faithful, Question of Sport . It’s a sound basic formula which has survived the decades by being personality-proof, surviving several changes of quizmaster and team captains and feeding on the British public’s fundamental interest in sport of one kind or another. In its present incarnation, team captains Matt Dawson and Ally McCoist are superintended by Sue Barker, who attempts to assert a schoolmarmish order but is often as much a spectator to the banter as the rest of us. With a Glaswegian prominent in the show, native wit is never going to be in short supply, but sporting folk from all kinds of activities seem to enjoy taking the rise out of each other and the end result is a show which is safe, entertaining and casts its net just widely enough to be a challenge to the general viewer- an encyclopaedic knowledge of football is unlikely to help you with a question on athletics, and a female swimmer is just as likely to end up with a question on rugby league. Perfect Friday evening wind-down viewing, in other words.

Friday in EastEnders didn’t so much wind down as kick off. There’s been a long-running domestic violence storyline which seems to be building, and tonight’s instalment took the form of the bookish daughter of the abusive white father and a black mother visiting her father on remand in prison. The pathos of the situation was done well- the girl wanted some kind of relationship with her father, even as she baited him with everything he’d done to the family, and it was difficult not to feel for her situation before an impassive justice system. Elsewhere, my fears of last night proved to be at least slightly unfounded, as tonight we actually saw the Down’s syndrome baby in what may be a turning point in this particular strand. The actor playing Billy really has done a good job of playing the downtrodden little man at the end of his tether, but the point of tonight’s episode was to have hard man Phil show him how to begin to bond with his daughter rather than allowing the situation to dominate him- however for this to happen, Billy had to be taken down a peg or two and shown just how much he was reacting to the situation rather than taking control of his response. This tied in nicely with the other ongoing story, where the moneygrabbing ex-soldier proved, in spite of a few practical jokes and other challenges, that he could handle himself behind a bar. It’s been something of a revelation to come back to EastEnders, which I haven’t watched regularly in a decade, but it’s clear that the production team take their show seriously and make an effort to do the best possible job- plotting and scripting are well thought out, and some of the performances are outstanding- there’s no sense of it being "only" a soap.

The Green, Green Grass is a curious beast; taking the characters of Boycie and Marlene from Only Fools and Horses and transplanting them into the borderlands of Shropshire might seem an unusual step at the best of times, but it seems to be curiously unaware of what the strengths of the original series were (in particular the tragicomedy of a close-knit family living in the gutter but looking at the stars) or of what it’s trying to be. As originally conceived, the character of Boycie worked best as somebody who saw himself as the respectable side of the underworld but whose dealings mainly subsidised a tactless and superficial wife. Here, while Boycie is nominally lord of the manor and still up to a few schemes here and there, the supporting cast is made up of stock yokels and the conniving Llewellyn, sometimes only a hair’s breadth away from a stereotypical Welshman. For the format to work properly, the locals need to be cleverer and craftier than Boycie without letting him realise it- and while the first part of the premise was just about true tonight, there was little irony in the situation and instead a lot of messing about with wigs. It’s mildly amusing, but it doesn’t show many signs of the stable where it originated and I can’t see it scaling the same heights.

And to finish, that much-lamented creature, the single drama, reappeared with Angel Cake, a light comedy set in Newcastle and featuring Sarah Lancashire as a housewife with a sideline in decorating cakes, whose life seemed to tale a miraculous turn when a batch of rock cake mixture baked itself into the likeness of the Virgin Mary. You could never accuse Sarah Lancashire of having much of a range as an actress- you’re going to get dippy Northern women, and that’s that- and along with co-star Rita Tushingham, she seemed to be excused Geordie accent duty, but what followed was sharp, heart-warming and ultimately life-affirming. The message of the film was ultimately that miracles are in the eye of the beholder, and we make our own- the amazing reversals of fortune which the characters seemed to experience and then lose finally reached an equilibrium, as the lead character lost her husband and then got him back, her son seemed to find love rather than cheap and easy sex before finally recognising his responsibilities to the children he already had, and the main character’s friend struggled with her self-image until becoming comfortable with herself, her size and her husband’s affection. Again, the plotting was sound and led to a satisfying conclusion, and the dialogue definitely of a superior quality, delivered with relish. I had fears that it would either be mawkish or simply a vehicle for a former soap star, but it turned out to be an entertaining and amusing little drama. I’d have to say that as Friday night television, it complemented an undemanding evening’s viewing and left me with a smile.

To try to draw some conclusions, then, I think the general state of BBC1 is healthy but not exactly stretching. EastEnders is clearly the cornerstone of the weekday evening schedule and I think it’s fair to say that it covers much of the ground which in days gone by would have been the province of "serious" dramas dealing with social issues- which is surely to the ultimate benefit of the issues, because it’s easier to empathise with, say, the parents in the Down’s syndrome storyline if they’re characters you’ve come to know over a period of time than having to get to know their equivalents in a single play. As far as other dramas go, the co-produced Blackbeard was a diverting insight into the history behind the legend, Dalziel and Pascoe a good basic format trying slightly too hard to be complex and up to date, Angel Cake a nice bit of early weekend fun and Holby City far too sure of its own relevance and consequently deaf and blind to its outlandishness and impenetrability. Plenty of factual television too, although none of it particularly groundbreaking or insightful, and it’s disappointing to see so much of it played for entertainment value with only a vague nod towards attempting to educate the public. The amount of comedy was also disappointing, although to be fair I may have caught BBC1 on the shoulder of the autumn season- too early for the new series to enter the fray and too late for repeats- The Green, Green Grass is still a polish or two away from being as good as it could and probably should be, but for it to be the only sitcom on prime time BBC1 all week perhaps shows that comedy these days is raised in the periphery of BBC2 and BBC3 before the successful shows are transplanted to the senior channel. But as an attempt to keep the general viewer interested, the BBC1 schedule by and large achieves what it sets out to do, and if I didn’t feel particularly stretched at the end of the exercise then neither can I really lay hands on a moment when I felt bored either.