As you may recall, I have over the past two years been fretting over Horizon. Since 1964 it has been the staple crop of the BBC science department but in recent years it has been injected with a huge dose of populism to make it resistant to ratings decline. The intellectually modified Horizon has met with many protests, especially from me and, I am afraid, a two-part opener to this season that turned “madness” into a reality game show was more misjudged television. How pleasing, then, to report that last night it came up with a model documentary discussing the merits and demerits of genetically modified food (there: now you know where that extended agricultural metaphor was going).

The director Michael Lachmann had the inspired idea of getting Jimmy Doherty to present. Doherty was once a scientist. He is now an organic farmer, rearing the sorts of pigs you last read about in Thomas Hardy. He is also, as viewers who saw his excellent series Farming Heroes, an enthusiast for extensive farming if it is done responsibly. What is more, he slightly resembles Jamie Oliver, but without the messiah complex or the f word.

His trip from the pampas of Argentina, where from a standing start 20 years ago, half the arable land is now planted with GM soya beans, to the plantations of Uganda where the bananas are not resistant to black sigatoka but the politicians are to the technology that could save them, produced many pointed contrasts. In Uganda, subsistence farmers break in to the lab to steal the new-fangled plants and grow them. In Bavaria farmers invade the scientists' fields to destroy them. And it is not always a battle between Luddites and progressives. The Amish of Pennsylvania still tend the land in horse and cart but happily use GM seeds.

Doherty made the point that so far GM has not been used to feed the world but to make farmers rich. In Europe, where, thanks to the hysteria of the late 1990s it is close to impossible to eat GM produce, the luxury of not buying GM for a generation may be worth indulging. But the sight of sack after sack of GM maize, as ate in the US, rotting in the docks during the southern African famine of 2002 was, surely, obscene. In conclusion, Doherty, said that we should proceed carefully but proceed, and that meant letting experimental crops grow, not digging them up. It was the right conclusion for a serious science programme to reach and allows me room skittishly to observe that the only GM that concerns me is GMTV: look at what all those years on it did to Eamonn Holmes.

It is odd what sticks in a nonagenarian mind. My father clearly recalls the night that the Bournemouth evening newspaper screamed: “Can Bournemouth Afford Hutch?” Hutch - Leslie Hutchinson - was Britain's first black superstar, a crooner beloved by London café society and particularly its hostesses, even if they let him in only by the servants' entrance. This sad documentary demonstrated that Bournemouth could not afford him in the 1930s but certainly could have done by the 1960s, where his star had fallen so far that he was mainly working at the end of dilapidated piers.

High Society's Favourite Gigolo, part of a season that rather has it in for the Royal Family, tried hard to blame his decline and fall on Edwina Mountbatten who had conducted a 30-year affair with Hutch and then, at the palace's insistence, sued the People when it got word the pair had been admitted to hospital, the victims of a sudden vaginismus that rendered them literally inseparable. High Society took her part. Beaverbrook banned Hutch from his papers. The BBC shunned him. But Edwina had no such inhibitions and resumed their dalliance. When he died in penury in 1969, Loud Louis paid for his headstone.

The documentary was nothing if not prurient on the matter of Hutch's “legendary manhood”, decorated on occasion, it was rumoured, by Edwina's gift of a diamond-encrusted sheath. It was also keen to highlight his promiscuity, his neglect of his children and his dismissal of other blacks. It was less interested in what, from snatches, sounded a beautiful but very period-specific voice.

A couple of readers say I have been unfair to Survivors. One points out that the 1970s version also had a woman lead the group, and that was well before political correctness took grip at the BBC. So I tried to like it more last night. When the survivors were not trying to have it off with one another they were discussing what sort of piece of work was Man. Was he essentially evil? Or good? Someone mentioned Lord of the Flies, the work of fiction representing the case for the other side presumably being In the Night Garden. Still, Today got a Thought for the Day out of it yesterday morning. It is resonating with some folk.

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