Some documentaries can’t fail to bring a tear to the eye and a lump to the throat. One Life (BBC One) featured nine-month-old Toby, suffering from a vulnerable immune system that required him to be housed in a sterile bubble of clean air while waiting for a bone-marrow transplant. My New Face (Channel 4) followed two renowned cranio-facial surgeons, whose Facing the World charity helps impoverished children with severe facial deformities. It put all other makeover shows to shame; it wasn’t the best night for Five to launch its Ladette to Lady clone, Asbo Teen to Beauty Queen.

Yet real-life tragedy doesn’t always guarantee a tear. Karen Wightman’s Herald of Free Enterprise: The True Story (BBC One) left me feeling like a heartless bastard. It told how the cross-Channel ferry Herald of Free Enterprise, its bow doors left open, capsized in 1987 outside the Belgian port of Zeebrugge with the loss of 193 lives. It was, Max Beesley’s voiceover told us, the worst disaster in British civilian maritime history since the Titanic.

Simply mentioning that ship’s name seemed to prompt the film to milk a sense of impending doom as it introduced some of the survivors and victims with staged scenes. “The Pinnells family is looking forward to a day out but the trip will leave them fighting for their lives in the North Sea,” Beesley intoned as if he were about to expose more medical malpractice in Bodies. For a long-distance lorry driver, “this journey would test the limits of his endurance”.

The programme couldn’t wait to show us snippets of forthcoming scenes with actors as the anguished passengers thrashing around in a water tank. Now I enjoy a good disaster movie, especially when the survival expectancy is determined by the actors’ ranking in the credits. But combine such action thrills with the testimonies of those who experienced the calamity and you verge on disaster porn.

Wightman’s film was often like a low-rent version of The Poseidon Adventure, complete with CGI ferry overturning. These scenes never sat well with such real-life recollections as that of a Belgian Navy helicopter diver and his life-and-death choices while winching passengers out of the freezing water.

In the end we needed a more rigorous look at why the trial that charged the ferry company with corporate manslaughter collapsed and less “Hollywood, look at me, I can do disaster movies on a budget” antics.

30 Days (More 4) is the kind of documentary series that’s like a stick of rock with the presenter’s personality running through it. Morgan Spurlock, best known as the fast-food human guinea pig in Super Size Me, had himself incarcerated in an overcrowded county jail in Virginia. After nearly a month he concluded that rehabilitation was the only way forward and that “the punishment is the monotony”. But what might ease that tedium for actual inmates — though not in a good way — is just the kind of conflict that 30 Days often sidesteps.

Spurlock, like most of his subjects, is a well-meaning guy who perhaps would like to win hearts and minds, but without getting in your face about it. His gentle compassion is admirable, but last night’s programme hardly made profound viewing while cartoon-accompanied splurges of statistics made it seem more like a Ladybird guide to the American penal system.

There was more pep in Stanley Goes to Europe (More 4) because it featured Stanley Johnson, the father of the bumbly, mop-topped MP Boris. It showed that Boris isn’t some kind of one-off Woosterian experiment but is doing a pretty decent impersonation of his dad. Stanley, an environmentalist and former Tory MEP, trotted around Europe to highlight what irritates him about EU policies.

He found subsidised French wineries turning their unwanted product into bio-fuel. In Spain EU money supported the protection of the Iberian lynx but was pumping even more funds into dam-building and irrigation that threatened this big cat’s natural habitat. In Greece, EU subsidies had led to tobacco-growers being snuffed out.

By the end, Johnson had not only amiably illustrated how policies from Brussels were often at odds with each other, but also saved British organ-makers from EU legislation banning the use of lead in their pipes; for some reason organs had been classified as electrical goods. Along the way he had enjoyed some lovely drink and hearty meals. Then it struck me: his EU concerns partly seemed prompted by his love of good food, fine wine and a decent smoke. To his credit, he more or less admitted it himself.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette