I wonder who screwed the better deal from the producers of The Last Enemy (BBC One, last night)? Was it the veteran Robert Carlyle, a Bond-villain-level movie star, who did not have to learn a single line of dialogue for last night's 90-minute opening episode, but just look menacing? Or was it Benedict Cumberbatch, so good in Hawking and Stuart: A Life Backwards but as yet only a rising star? He had to tell a Home Office committee: “They have known about each and every one of us for years: all the important information, information you can sell, your diets, how much alcohol you consume what you read how much your house is worth”...and on for another minute, concluding with: “You couldn't legislate against them or their type if you tried, unless you banned credit cards and the internet, which would be [much-needed impact pause] totalitarian.”

The writer Peter Berry's dense, heavy-feeling thriller is much obsessed with the thought that we are being watched like hawks. In fact it began with a camera-equipped hawk spying on an aid worker's van as it blew up along the Afghan-Pakistan border. On board was a saintly charity worker, Michael Ezard, whom we soon had good reason to suppose is neither as dead nor as saintly as his funeral eulogies insist. The good reason for supposing he is alive is that Michael is played by Max Beesley, who is a bit of a star himself and will not have signed to be wasted on a few flashbacks. As for his saintliness, Michael's brother Stephen says he wasn't a nice brother to have at all. And brothers know, you know.

Soon Stephen, a brilliant mathematician, is press-ganged by his former girlfriend, now a glam government minister, into working on the state's Big Brother programme, TIA, Total Information Awareness, which involves a lot of people watching a lot of people on television screens. They have been doing this since the first series of 24, of course, but here it has got worse since a terrorist bombing of Victoria station.

Stephen, the Cumberbatch part, is the series's Winston Smith, although Berry has given him so many quirks that he could spin off into his own detective series. He is shy, a mathematician and has OCD. On the night of his brother's funeral he beds his widow. It's the quiet ones you have to watch, although, as I say, he was not nearly as quiet as Carlyle, playing an agent gone bad with really cold eyes. I'm not sure if The Last Enemy is something I'll have to watch.

The Last Enemy was not as good as George Melly's Last Stand on BBC Two last night. Following the last months of the singer/raconteur's life, this was a programme you really did not want to end because you knew when it did George would have ended, too. Melly greeted the anthology of disease he died from with the good humour with which he greeted everyone. This did not make him a good patient, since he insisted on performing gigs almost up to his death. His wife, Diana, was the funny- sad tale's real hero, kind, unpatronising, candid and bowing to sentiment only once, at one of his final concerts. “I must be fluey,” she explained.

When you are George Melly, dying means saying goodbye to an awful lot of mistresses and we witnessed the warm adieus he gave to Molly Parkin and an American artist called Elda Abramson, with whom he had had a 14-year affair. Diana explained that she had stopped sleeping with her husband in 1971, apart from a one-night stand in the early 1980s, a couple of days after which he informed her he had given her the clap. With everyone being so honest it was a pity about the producer/director Katie Buchanan's faux naïf commentary. “As I watched Molly and George chat it struck me that maybe there had been a bit more to the relationship than met the eye.” Come on Katie, you knew that. We all knew that.

The Melly film was followed by a Storyville documentary, Blue Blood, about Oxford University's Amateur Boxing Association which every year invites the coming generation's brightest brains to be knocked about a bit. The sport is ugly. The boxers we followed were unprepossessing. The prize, an Oxford “blue”, ridiculous. Yet Stevan Riley's lovingly crafted 2006 film was a strangely beautiful thing.

Out of the Box

BBC News 24 is dropping many of its specialist half-hour programmes for budget reasons. This may be no bad thing. Early on Friday morning, as news broke that the Chicago University massacre had killed five students, it was showing BBC World News America. Despite its title, because it was prerecorded Matt Frei's programme was still talking of “injuries” and was contradicted by News 24's own ticker. Sky News also nearly got caught, showing at 12.30am a pre-recorded CBS News. After five minutes it abandoned it and switched to its own coverage.

CBBC is getting a bad press over ending Grange Hill, but in a letter to Broadcast, its controller, Anne Gilchrist, hits out at the whingers who have largely been “adults with their usual selfish obsession for nostalgia”. CBBC viewers have been “overwhelmingly supportive” of the axeing. A funny sort of compliment, but you take them where you can, I suppose.

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