It was a fairly typical day of property porn telly: on BBC One Homes under the Hammer, To Buy or Not to Buy; on BBC Two Escape to the Country; on ITV1, 60 Minute Makeover; on Channel 4 A Place in the Sun; and on Five, Put Your Money Where Your House Is - daytime fare, wishful thinking for stay-at-home parents, pensioners and shift workers. But then, at 8pm, once the serious mortgage payers had arrived home, came a dose of reality. Andrew Verity, a property journalist, and Jenny Scott, an economist, delivered the first of an excellent two-part report (the second's tonight), The Truth About Property. It was on BBC Two but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't give Panorama on school testing and ITV1's Tonight on cheap food a run for their sub-primes.

Verity thought property was still over-valued. He was renting, waiting for the moment to buy. He had a hunch that despite the horror headlines, most people were rather pleased at the price falls. Scott was more conventionally minded: she believed people whose notional wealth was based on the property escalator wouldn't wear it. So they asked around and then they commissioned a poll. One in five wanted properties to rise in price, a quarter wanted it to fall and nearly a half craved stability. So what's the panic? The panic, they explained, was for the 500,000 mortgage-payers who have borrowed so much that their homes will dip into negative equity with a 20 per cent fall in prices. If they stopped spending, the economy really would be heading south.

There was certainly panic, and understandable panic, in the Sawbridge household in Sheffield where Andy had a £400-a-month mortgage he had been paying off with a £300-a-week job until he found himself out of work. Abbey, his obtuse mortgage lender (it wrote him letters addressed to “Sheffield, South Glamorgan”), was sending frequent threats to repossess, which did not cease even when his wife, Sarah, explained that she had just found work herself and would soon be paid. They had 36 days to find £400, and, as Sarah tearfully said, nowhere to go. Flash John London was looking pretty sick, too, having financed a champagne and Jacuzzi lifestyle by taking equity out of his house with every notional price rise. Irony of ironies, he was one of the 4,000 estate agents who had lost his job this year. His Audi Quattro had a For Sale notice in its windscreen.

But it was good news for buyers. If you are trading up, the fall in your place's value is less, in hard cash, than the fall in your next place's. Or you could go to Florida and join the foreclosedtour.com bus ride through an estate vacated by sub-primers. There you could pick up a luxury pile for $189,000. It was in Florida we caught up with Raj, a Brit who five years ago lived in a rented room and now has an £8 million property portfolio. Raj is one of those guys who stuff leaflets through your door offering to buy your place for 80 per cent of its value. You can then rent it back off him. What happened if Raj could no longer get his mortgages and went bust was a question left uneasily in the air.

Alicia Arce's lively programme was meant to be reassuring: Abbey eventually turned merciful (Andy Sawbridge celebrated with a Mohican hairdo) and London got a job (as, uh-oh, a mortgage consultant). It was actually very scary.

There was good news about education, however. Not from Panorama but on Teen Mum High (BBC Two), which found an Ofcom-lauded secondary school in Stockport with an exemplary pupil-to-teacher ratio, attendance rates and an English teacher to die for. The only problem is to get into Moat House your daughter needs to be a mum or pregnant.

You couldn't even be angry with 13-year-old Keyleigh whose periods had started at her stepfather's funeral (he had died suddenly at 31). She thought her coming baby would change the family's luck. She wasn't even scared about the birth. “My mum's done it - five times - nearly died twice.” And out splashed Molly, in the middle of a sitting room populated by five generations of once young mums. But most impressive was Hannah, at 13 a weed-smoking truant but thanks to the agency of an allegedly split condom now on course for seven GCSEs. All these girls needed was attention. They got it, all right.

OUT OF THE BOX

With Doctor Who, we viewers never know where the doctor will materialise next. Or do we? At a theatre opening last Friday, I found myself standing next to David Tennant who was being swamped by fans wanting his autograph. Tennant showed great good humour. He just wanted to know how on earth they knew he'd be there.

With so much horror on the news right now, it is hard to believe anyone could worry about Friday's episode of Derren Brown: Trick of Treat, which deceived a young woman into believing she had killed a kitten. Yet C4 fielded 50 complaints before transmission. Its defence was that a kitten handler was on set throughout and that Lauren, the participant, had had a psych test and was deemed psychologically robust. Reassuringly, there were only 16 complaints afterwards, when it became clear that curiosity had not killed the cat.

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