Let’s begin with the easy bit. Malcolm and Barbara – Love’s Farewell (Wednesday, ITV1) was exactly and indisputably the sort of programme that people who complain complain doesn’t get made any more. It was a glittering ornament in the diadem of broadcasting: solidly made, carefully authored, a thoughtful film that left Wednesday evening a better place than it found it. Paul Watson’s documentary was about a man suffering from Alzheimer’s, and a wife suffering from loving a man suffering from Alzheimer’s. I should declare an interest here: my father died of Alzheimer’s, so I wasn’t a dispassionate, disinterested observer. But then, I guess, neither were many of you. It’s an unusual adult who hasn’t suffered along with someone who has dementia.

Alzheimer’s has been in the news a lot recently because of drugs and Nice and potential advances in clinical treatment. It’s an illness that is reported as being about chemistry and medical economics, and that’s not what it’s really about at all. If you have to live with it, dementia is about care and caring, about eking out a lifetime’s savings of love – the love you have for someone who is slowly and relentlessly being reduced, so that what you once loved is barely left at all. Love is the lock and key of Alzheimer’s. It chains spouses and families to being 24-hour nurses as they grieve, and it’s the key that allows the state to usurp its obligation of care in a way that it can’t with any other incurable illness.

Watson’s film caught the sorrow and the pity of a wife’s predicament with his usual decency. It was a harrowing programme that rightly didn’t allow us the mitigation of a sentimental ending: there was no uplifting moral, no trite suggestion of the divinity of suffering or the grace of sacrifice. It was just bloody sad and unfair.

It wasn’t perfect television. Shot over 11 years, it lost track of passing time and was occasionally jerky. And, crucially, there was little sense of the man before his illness – some photographs, a brief CV and his music – so while our sympathy and concern were naturally with his wife, it was difficult to empathise with a man who was demented and childish and angry. It’s the past life being traduced and humiliated that is such a part of the sadness of Alzheimer’s. That said, a Paul Watson documentary any night of the week is worth a month of most of the other stuff we are offered.

Now to the hysterical fuss over the final sequence of the programme. The film itself was, naturally, short of laughs, but the manufactured row about Malcolm’s demise – did we see it or didn’t we? – was deeply and darkly risible. It was the Norwegian blue all over again: this man is dead, deceased, he’s popped his clogs, gone to join the choir invisible. “No, he’s not, he’s just resting.” He’s not resting, he is no more. “He’s hibernating.” It’s the silly season, and, as the tabloid press made up leviathans off St Ives, so they were composing bilious and splenetic screeds about yet more damn lies from television and the public’s apparent loss of trust in broadcasting, as if people trust the papers to tell them where their trust has gone.

The argument about editing affecting honesty is entirely spurious, and I suspect everyone knows it is. The complainers call for Dogma rules for making TV programmes, which is absurd, and we all know it’s absurd. Editing and editorial decisions reveal truth by removing extraneous facts. It’s like sculpting: the block of marble is the fact, the image inside is the truth. In the end, what you need to ask is not, “Is this literal?” but, “What is the motivation for saying it? Who gains?” As I am writing this in a newspaper, perhaps I should stop while I’m ahead and point out that TV really doesn’t need baying enemies while it still has Michael Grade inside the tent, a man who never liked or understood broadcasting and went off to run other entertainments that he also failed to comprehend, and is now back, like an ageing child living with mummy and daddy, sullen and bitter, slapping the hand that pats his ego.

The final argument against Watson’s film came from the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (or Mediawatch-UK, as it is now known), which said it wasn’t nice to show the moment of death. And I thought the NVLA itself was dead and buried, along with Mary Whitehouse. But, apparently, she has come back as a round, bald man in spectacles. Ignore them: they have no friends. There is actually far too little death on TV: our news is censored of all mortal consequences to protect the squeamish and suit the government, while there are dozens of violent, sadistic, graphic deaths in dramas every night. So, on the one hand, we are desensitised by artifice; on the other, kept ignorant and fearful of reality. Where’s the truth, and the lies, in that?

Three cookery programmes kitted up this week. Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein, the Mike and Bernie Winters of TV catering, two very, very nice men, both had new shows. In Jamie at Home (Tuesday, C4), Oliver is looking for a change of culinary direction, semaphored by a weird and overwrought trailer. He has moved from campaigning about the real world to proselytising about an Arcadian one; his boundless and contagious enthusiasm is aimed at knocking up the good life. He has gone from urban scooter bum with the pubbable mates and the pancetta butties to a rural, wide-vowelled lord of the manor with a garter. It’s an awkward transition. It’s like something out of PG Wodehouse. The recipes and the method and the banter are as winning as ever, and he is on the side of the angels, but it’s less about how we eat and more about how we dream of eating. It’s aspirational lifestyle soft porn: the wood-burning oven, the walled kitchen garden, Mellors in the polytunnel, all organic and wholesome and Edenish. There is a suspicion that perhaps Jamie has cashed in the cred for rock-star rural – this is his concept-album series, the one that goes with the fish farm and the tweed and the taking up hunting.

Rick Stein is driving round the Med in a Land Rover. What is it with cookery shows and personality transport? Rick Stein’s Mediterranean Escapes (Wednesday, BBC2) is really Judith Chalmers Does Dinner. It’s more aspirational travel porn. The recipes are a bolt-on, presumably, for a book. “You won’t be able to get Corsican sausage, so use chorizo instead.” That really won’t do on cookery shows any more.

And finally, Cook Yourself Thin (Tuesday, C4). Four sloaney chalet girls do filthy things with food, but not in a fun way. These are snorting hoorays of a type I thought I’d never see again. Flushed and lumpy, all gums and bravado, claiming to be size 12 – frankly, girls, only if you suck in very hard and wear the magic knickers – they honk and snigger while removing all the joy and hospitality from food, substituting the meagre and nasty for the generous and pleasurable. And that’s as good a definition of philistinism as you’ll find. There is in this concept an authentic taste of Olde England, where the pleasure of eating is all in the parsimony and the disappointment of second best, stoically endured. This is food whose point is all in the colon and never on the tongue.

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