What your TV would say, if it could talk

If your TV could talk, it would be a townie, down with urban slang, knowledgeable about loft living and brimming with opinions about the merits and demerits of bendy buses. It would conceive of the countryside, however, as a rather large garden attached to a shambolic stately home, with Patsy Kensit and other Emmerdale cast members disporting in the flowerbeds, occasionally serving one another poisoned cream teas.

Against this background of hopelessly urban TV scheduling, Molly Dineen's The Lie of the Land was salutary. A documentary about the decline of the farming industry, it would have been an outstanding piece of work in any context. Its impact derived from detail steadily accrued over several in-depth character studies of Cornish farmers, none of whom was called Starkadder.

When we met Glyn, he was breaking the fluttering wings of live partridges, as matter-of-factly as if he were topping carrots. He was a countryman, and without sentimentality. He built his home with his own hands. So when he later spoke to camera with saddened concern about factory farming methods - such as the way male chickens are tossed, live, into an industrial shredder - his observations had real weight. "We've become unreal about animals," he said.

Dineen also accompanied Ian, gruff and wind-ruddied, on "the flesh run". His job was disposing of livestock - the sick, the dying, or the unmarketable. He had to wrestle a healthy, glossy day- old calf to the ground and shoot it in the head, simply because it was the wrong breed for beef and the wrong gender for dairy. Then he hurled its still twitching body into the van and skinned it using a rope and a Jeep (country skills, remember, country skills). As payment for this job, the farmer had left out [pound]2 and a packet of fudge.

This is an industry on the brink, Dineen suggested, extrapolating a wider significance from these closely observed pieces of footage by dropping in apposite facts, here and there: in the 1970s, we spent one third of our annual incomes on food; now, it is between eight and nine per cent. Importing and legislation are forcing native farmers out. Defra gets a lot of flak in this film, and David Miliband's discomfort should only be enhanced by the knowledge that Dineen made one of the first New Labour party political broadcasts.

Dineen is a gifted TV portraitist, with a genius for leaving in the inconsequential stuff that matters so much, like the jubilant rat-catching sequence, or the shot in which the tough old farmer strokes the dead calf 's head. In her hands, the camera's senses become unusually keen, perhaps because she doesn't use music or graphics. You can practically smell the manure in this film, and feel the keen wind.

Dineen's interviewing style is naturally sympathetic. Her epic profile of Geri Haliwell was remarkably kind to its subject, and so is The Lie of the Land, which never calls the farmers to account for their role in their own predicament. But what it lacks in interrogation it makes up for in sensitivity. At the close, Dineen allows the controlled, unflinching tone of the programme to become softer, elegiac even.

In a memorable closing sequence, Glyn calls to his cattle, who come trotting across two vast fields. Why are they coming, when you're normally beating and scolding them? Dineen asks. "Cos they're my dears!" he replies, halloowing to his kine across the verdant meadows.

One Life: Famously Reincarnated showcased a rather different interview technique. This focused on people who passionately believe they are the reincarnated representatives of Elvis, Merlin, or even James IV (the woman in question was shown holding up a history book with James IV on the cover and saying briskly "Now that is the best portrait of me anyone ever did.") The subjects of the programme were psychically fragile, to say the least. But Richard Macer, who filmed, produced and directed, questioned them with Paxo-like vigour. When Merlin showed him his plasticine "friends", Macer observed, witheringly: "but these are just imaginary characters".

Getting tough with a civil servant is one thing, but getting tough with a man who is best friends with King Arthur and wears an ear of corn as an earring is quite another. The jarring tone spoiled the whole film.

Maxwell I found fantastically enjoyable. It wasn't a sober assessment of his crimes nor a definitive rendering of his final moments (whether he jumped or slipped off the Lady Ghislaine was left, wisely, to our imagination). Instead, it was a cracking drama. Could any actor alive have done better than David Suchet? I doubt it. Physically he is smaller (12 stone to Maxwell's 22) but his performance was big enough to make up the difference. A lesser actor would have emphasised his villainy, but Suchet dared to make him likeable. His crush on his secretary was a little misty-eyed, perhaps, but this production's loyalty was to good drama, not vengeance on behalf of the 32,000 pensioners Maxwell defrauded.