As Your Life In Their Hands first demonstrated 50 years ago, few things are of greater entertainment value to the average Briton than a body being hacked up in the operating room, so long as it is not their own. Sunday was a veritable theme night for sawbones fans, particularly those who prefer their surgery on the primitive side. In Casualty 1907 (BBC One), amid much raspberry jam visual effects, a leg was severed beneath the knee. The amputation was a blow to the surgeon, who had previously asked his students: “Is a hero's life worth more than a coward's? Probably not, but I suggest we do the damndest for this fellow.” It was an even sorer disappointment to the hero in question.

Casualty 1907 is not a member of the Holby franchise but a three-part dramatisation of 100-year-old case histories from the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. It is so well researched that even the romance between the dashing Aussie surgeon Millais (William Houston) and delightful nurse Ethel (Charity Wakefied) actually happened. For added credibility, it is topped and tailed with captions explaining that life expectancy was 45 years back then, that the Blind Beggar Gang existed, and that children really did starve to death for insurance claims. A boy had a skin condition that rendered him more grotesque than a Doctor Who alien. He too was drawn from the files.

Yet somehow the drama got the better of the history and it was hard to get too upset about these folks' ailments. Last night's opener began like an episode of ER with the legend “Previously”, the previously in question being the show's long-forgotten 2006 pilot. Soon we were inside laundry cupboards where doctors propositioned ward sisters, dorms where pretty nurses practised smoking techniques, and wards where doctors eyed the tail and thought aloud: “I don't mind if I do.” An unpopular patient was given a turpentine enema: “Grease the buttocks and anus - we don't want any burning.” The ghost of Carry On haunted the enterprise.

Storyville's The English Surgeon (BBC Two; tonight in Scotland) went one better than Casualty 1907's amputation by showing a patient having his head drilled while he was still conscious. The English surgeon was Henry Marsh, who in Tooting wields state-of-the-NHS equipment and in the Ukraine a £30 cordless Bosch. The patient was Marian Dolishny. He was having his tumour removed without anaesthetic because the clinic run by Marsh's friend, Igor Petrovich, currently does not run to them. Dolishny said it felt like the builders were in, sanding and scraping. Although his drill's batteries were flat, Marsh eventually reached the tumor and removed the blob of rubber from its cream cheese surround.

Marsh and Igor enjoyed philosophical conversations about the purpose of life, which concluded unsensationally that it is to help other people. Marsh, an Oxford type in wise-old-owl spectacles, does not entirely avoid the smugness of the technician who knows he is supremely good at his job, but nor can he disguise his pain as he squints at brain scans of Ukrainians whose conditions are beyond his favorite gift, that of hope.

He called brain surgery a blood sport and was big enough to acknowledge the bouts he lost. None seems to have affected him more than an operation he performed on a child called Tania who died in a worse state than if he had left unwell alone. We were shown Marsh sharing a thank you meal with her family, which he clearly did not feel he deserved.

The documentary was moving and will probably win prizes but I am not quite sure why the Storyville team was so excited about it. Beyond demonstrating that Marsh was a good egg, that the NHS's bureaucracy and waste frustrated him and that Ukraine was still bloody poor, it lacked insight. We saw Marsh at home being waited on by an attractive blonde but we were not told who she was (I assume it was his second wife, the social anthropologist Kate Fox, author of Watching the English). Nor were we told that his own son, now 28, had a brain tumour diagnosed when he was three months old. The film came very close to voyeurism, not in showing the surgery but the high tea with Tania's mother.

It additionally had the unfortunate side-effect of making brain surgery look, actually, not so hard.

Out of the Box

Thanks to the millions the BBC has spent, its i-Player is now an easy way to catch up on programmes you miss. My problem is I still like to watch television on a television and although I have a DVD burner, BBC downloads are not transferable to it. Or so I thought. I now have a solution, albeit one that involves buying two programmes, Replay Media Catcher (which captures anything that moves on the net) and AVS Video Converter (which decodes them). And so, last week, I watched Gavin & Stacey from the comfort of my sofa.

Want to know the plot of the forthcoming Sex and the City Movie? Carrie and Big's wedding is off; in mourning she turns brunette; Steve betrays Miranda; Charlotte, having gone to the bother of adopting, falls pregnant; Samantha dons a big hat. Of course, Entertainment Weekly might have that all wrong.

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