Come into the garden, Tony, the metaphors are lovely

The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair CHANNEL 4

Saving Planet Earth BBC1

The Tower BBC1

The BBC's obsession with trailing its own programmes is getting out of hand. Take Tony Blair's last Prime Minister's Questions. In a once-in-adecade scene, members from both benches were on their feet, giving the PM an ovation that would have embarrassed Pavarotti. What did BBC2 do? Cut straight to a trailer for Rome.

Apologies have been made, but in the context of general BBC policy, you can see why it happened. Applause, credits and any form of bow-taking is out of favour, to be nipped and tucked like so much baggy flesh. We became used to end credits rolling faster than the human eye could see. We learned to use pause to find out if that really was Joanna Lumley in a wig. But now we need binoculars as well as a remote control. In a new BBC cross-channel initiative, titles have been demoted further still, to a space smaller than a quarter of the screen, a little box in the corner that flickers inconsequentially, while voiceover and visuals urge you to flip over to catch what's hot on BBC3. They might as well have a man holding his nose and fanning at the credits, it's so disrespectful to cast and crew.

It's bad in many ways, this title abuse. It's a small derogation of accountability, somehow, implying the makers of the programme deserve neither praise nor blame. And it makes the pace of TV more frenetic still. It takes away the full stop at the end of the programme, the small pause for reflection. A documentary as impressive and troubling as David Attenborough's Sharing Planet Earth (the serious prologue to the more lightweight Saving Planet Earth - of which more later) deserved the solemnity of a proper credit sequence, not this split-screen sales pitch. I wanted a moment to process what I'd just been told. (Reduce your consumption of resources or the Bengal tiger gets it.) Instead, I was bounced straight back to another programme, like a binge eater to a cupboard.

So the final sequence from the movie of Tony Blair's premiership ended up on the cutting room floor. But Andrew Rawnsley's fascinating film The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair didn't miss a trick. A three-hour-long evaluation of the Blair decade, it included some devastating insights from his former colleagues. Baroness Jay described how when cabinet meetings got on to the nitty gritty of a topic the Prime Minister would assume what she called his "garden look" - the focus of his gaze shifting past his colleagues out onto the lawns of No 10. A green thought in a green shade, perhaps. Blair's grand vision brought with it an inattention to detail; the detail of parliamentary process, of governmental departments and, most fatally, the detail of the post-invasion plan for Iraq.

Rawnsley mined super material from his interviewees. But his own script was too florid for me. Tony Blair, in siding with American foreign policy, "tied himself to the tail of a tiger". This I could take. But the bombast had got out of hand by 2004, when Tony Blair's ideal of humanitarian interventionism "lay bleeding to death on the killing fields of Iraq". Alongside a walking wounded metaphor, perhaps.

Saving Planet Earth paired celebrities with endangered species, sending Will Young to hunt grubs with gorillas, Carol Thatcher to befriend the albatross, and Jack Os-bourne to shout "Awesome!" at African pachyderms. (They were rather sore about getting him, apparently. "What's he ever done?" said a spokesman from the elephant community. "We were hoping for Jeremy Paxman.") It was a secondhand tactic (ITV did just the same thing last year with Extinct) and a shamelessly populist one too, but when the cause is as urgent as saving the last 720 mountain gorillas, you grab populism with both hands.

I cannot recommend The Tower highly enough. This series interviews all the different types of people living on the Pepys council estate in Deptford, south London - from local crack-smoking scrap-metal scavengers to their new neighbours, recycling-mad yuppies moving into the Berkeley home development next door. Judging by the first episode, it doesn't shoehorn its interviewees into social stereotypes but watches and listens to them carefully, with the same compassionate attentiveness as Tony Parker's marvellous 1983 book about a council estate, People of Providence. It was clearly a labour of love for the director/producer Anthony Wonke, whose name deserves to be seen in steady print, not on the tiny treadmill of the modern credit sequence.

Further viewing Watch Paxo's greatest moments on youtube.com/ results?search_query=jeremy+paxman

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