Deborah Moggach, the adaptor of the recent Pride and Prejudice and the BBC's 2001 Love in a Cold Climate, is so sure of her craft that she has the confidence not to take risks. The way to grab our attention and, perhaps, a little critical heat for her The Diary of Anne Frank, would have been to begin with the storming of the Frank family's achterhuis or, even more graphically, Anne's death in Bergen-Belsen. Instead Moggach tipped us gently into the banality not of evil but of adolescence. “Later on it seems to me,” Anne reads from her diary, “neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the chatterings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.” The challenge facing the dramatisation, which runs all this week, is to convince us that her chattering would matter even if everything turned out happily.

Staying faithful to Anne's teen-centric narrative meant that the Holocaust was only a background hum to last night's opener. The family relocated to their hiding place above her father's offices after her sister was called up to a Nazi work camp. In Anne's eyes this is an inconvenience rather than an injustice, a pettiness on a par with the ban on Jews using trams, ice rinks, and public parks. “But we can still go out with a boy!” she enthuses. The path to Belsen is not even dimly visible to her - or to any young viewer unaware of why this is the most famous diary in history.

Anne's adventure, in other words, appears to be into austerity rather than annihilation, more Railway Children than If This Is a Man. A comparison with Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française occurs, a novel by a brilliant French-Jewish writer who mistook the invasion of her country for a subject suited to a comedy of manners. So in this adaptation we are directed through the narrator's imagination to the irritating tics of her fellow lodgers, the senior Van Daans, played by Lesley Sharp and Ron Cook, and their nerdy son Peter (Geoff Breton). The incipient nervous breakdown of Anne's mother, played by the always excellent Tamsin Greig, is of much less account to Anne than whether Peter will “amount to much” as a romantic prospect.

By the end of the episode the dark clouds, we are told, are gathering, but it is the ordinariness of their extraordinary circumstances that is most poignant, little moments such as Lesley Sharp's cry of “bathroom free!” as she emerges from the loo. By keeping faith with the banality, Moggach and her director Jon Jones keep faith with Anne, and the more we believe in her the greater will be our outrage at her fate come Friday. It helps that, as Anne, Elle Kendrick steers a careful path between knowingness and naivety and is more charming than irritating.

Banality is too grand a word for the exercise being conducted by the affable journalist Jonathan Maitland on Tonight, the last networked “current affairs” programme on ITV. Inspired by the depression, Maitland is resolved (or was resolved; the programme was clearly shot in early autumn) to live for two weeks without spending, borrowing, begging or stealing money. Dumped in Bath, he is soon reduced to slurping the remains of other people's cappuccinos and picking choccie biscuits off pavements. Fortunately, unlike real tramps, Maitland has a team of researchers handily setting up interviews with professional foragers - of nature's bounty, skips and dropped penny pieces - and pointing him to websites where, through the kindness of strangers, free accommodation materialises. The programme made a few decent points about waste and materialism but not well enough to offset our annoyance at knowing that Maitland would end up with a nice fat cheque for playing poor when millions are about to be poor for real.

The dire Above Suspicion concluded. The great twist was that there was no twist. The prime suspect, the smoothy actor Alan Daniels, coughed to all the murders during a perfunctory interview with our heroine, the copper's daughter Anna Travis (Will she crack him? “Of course, she can. She's Jack Travis's girl”). The confession required Jason Durr as Daniels drastically to revise his accent and turn into Terry Christian. His lawyer looked on in disbelief, as did I. After Daniels had slit his throat with his collar stiffeners, Travis's cruddy old boss asked her for a date. She refused, because now she knew what men are really like.

Steve's mum Liz proved a more impressive interrogator on Corrie as she got her son to confess he was planning to dump the “dark-eyed beauty” Michelle for the “randy little blonde” Becky. The dump came not to pass, however, because Steve was diverted by his discovery of Liz's swiftly intensifying romance with his mate Lloyd. This left Katherine Kelly as Becky trying to wring some pathos out of a situation hitherto played by one and all for laughs. “It's like an episode of Everyone Loves Raymond,” she observed. If only, love.

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