God, the BBC is hitting them all out of the park at the moment, in children’s drama at least. There’s the on-going triumph of Doctor Who, of course — the season finale is approaching! Billie’s going to die! The Doctor has a child somewhere! How’s it all going to end? And now, That Summer Day, the first drama on what we must, I suppose, self- consciously refer to as 7/7.

Although it’s not an immediately obvious conclusion, terrorist attacks are, perhaps, best dealt with by children’s dramas. Trying to explain things to children forces writers to keep simple what could become hopelessly complex and full of caveats (“You see, it all started with the birth of Christ . . .”). Additionally, when four people blow themselves up, injuring or killing hundreds of innocent, even sympathetic, people, everyone, deep down, responds like a child. “What is going on? I don’t understand. Why would people do this? Am I going to die?” That Summer Day focuses on three main protagonists — Ayesha, Ben and Jack — from one school, from 8am to 3pm on the day of the bombings. It starts with Ben having a row with his dad, and ends with a racist bus-driver deciding Ayesha’s bass-guitar is a bomb, and throwing the whole class off a 36 bus. In between, the extraordinary day plays out against ordinary school business — back-chat to teachers, mobile phones being stolen, conversations about Big Brother, friendships either growing stronger or weaker. The small details of the day are well-remembered: the way the whole mobile network went down, so the children have to queue to use the school’s phones; some people’s serious belief that the French had done it, in revenge for London winning the Olympic bid.

The direction — sporadically diverting into a blipvert montage of kids playing in the playground, or of London going about its business — is ballsy, while the script (aside from a small, ill-conceived attempt to draw a parallel between school bullying and international terrorism) lets everyone get on with reacting. The trickiest bit in any children’s drama, of course, is the casting. Usually, you either get some hateful pint of teeth and eyes from Italia Conti, or some terrified, saturnine child who makes you wish that casting departments would just leave anything under 5ft 2in in the sandpit, and use puppets instead. For That Summer Day, however, most of the cast acquit themselves well, especially Sanchez Adams as Ben, while the real standout is Rosie Mahoney as the school bully, Kelly. She is blessed with the face of a council-estate Modigliani — all milky chin, hooded eyes and miniature mouth — and pitches the impassive fury of a bitchy girl perfectly. If they ever make a biopic of Courtney Love’s life, she’d be perfect for the lead role — up until the point Love went to Hollywood and bought herself an entire new head, anyway.

Over on BBC Four in Castrato programme-makers are rummaging round in history’s knicker-drawer, and focusing on the castrato singers of the 1700s. Now extinct for 150 years, the castrato voice was once widely held to be the most beautiful of human sounds: “The sweetness of a flute which leaps and leaps spontaneously. Like a lark, they loop through the air, intoxicated.”

This was because of the physiognomy of a castrato, who would, in a nutshell (a nutshell that the castrato, alas, would not have had), possess the small, pure vocal chords of a child, but the lungpower and resonance of an adult man. The castrato Farinelli, for instance, could sing 1,000 notes a minute, on one breath. As a big fan of Gary Numan, I personally eschew what sounds as if it would have been a gigantic hysterical spazz by someone dressed up like an Easter Egg: I prefer a dull monotone firmly explaining why it likes cars. And mine is the more ethical vocal preference, too. During the period in which castrati were fashionable, more than 100,000 children were either half-strangled, or drugged with opium, and then castrated with iron castrating tongs. Those who didn’t then die from either the opium or septicemia would face a life suspended in pre-puberty, regarded as neither man nor woman, on the off-chance that they would become famous singers, and earn their parents a fortune. Thankfully, this isn’t something Numan has had to cope with.

Using the newest technology, the BBC try to re-create the sound of the castrato singer — without, it has to be said, a great deal of luck. Personally, I would have thought that, in the era of X Factor, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to find half a dozen wannabes who would gladly have their nads off, if it gave them ten minutes on prime-time TV. With just three calls to a premium-rate line, we could have heard the first genuine castrato voice in 200 years, firing through Exultate Jubilate with just a bit more room in their trousers than usual. The boffins at BBC Four, one can only conclude, could do with watching a bit more rubbish telly.

Finally, let’s not even pretend that Only Fools on Horses — Sports Relief’s celebrities-showjumping-for- charity — is as silly as we will get. Here are some other things I fully expect celebrities to have done, for charity, by 2008: run a branch of TK Maxx for a week; scrub up for an appendectomy; learn to speak the dead language of the Druids; re- enact key battles of the Second World War with the cast of Emmerdale as “nice” Nazis; erotic auto-asphyxiation; Countdown.

That Summer Day, Fri, BBC Two & CBBC, 4.30pm ; Castrato, Wed, BBC Four, 9pm; Only Fools on Horses begins Fri, BBC One, 8.30pm