Through the Eyes of the Old BBC1

Malcolm in the Middle BBC2

Clocking Off BBC1

EastEnders BBC1

There shouldn't be any space in the schedules for a 90-minute documentary about old people. It's like conceiving a programme about black people or Americans, or women or the animal kingdom - downright patronising, frankly. Just imagine, for example, a programme pitch thus: 'Yeah, it's gonna be 90 minutes with loads of young people filmed in their own environments talking about what it's like to be, like, young! ' Enough to make you want to tune into the QVC shopping channel for, like, the rest of your life, right?

But given that there was room in the schedules for BBC1's Through the Eyes of the Old, I think it must have been aimed at the youngish ('Hey, old people! Cool!'), as it was, like, a roadmap for Wrinklyville, a crash-course in crinklydom. Which isn't to say that it wasn't fascinating, touching, funny, beautifully filmed and entirely engaging throughout, just that the very act of making a documentary about the old serves mostly to highlight their social exclusion and outsider status.

Of course, older readers are welcome to write in and contradict me in the kind of no-nonsense prose you tend to favour.

'I am 83 years old, have read The Observer since 1929, have been married for 60 years and, frankly young lady, I don't give a damn what you think about... ' began one memorable missive I received a few years back. And I was thrilled because the younger generation simply don't care enough to take the time and trouble to tell you just how much they really don't give a damn in several thousand violet-inked copperplate words. No, they just scribble, 'SHUT up you, stupid ignorant cow?' and punctuate appallingly.

Anyway, as if to emphasise the perception of elderly lives lived in a social exclusion zone, the majority of participants were accompanied by snapshots of their younger selves, perhaps meant to act as a validation and reminder that even the most stooped, baggy, watery-eyed, stammering, blurred-round-the-edges piece of crumpling humanity had a youth once, way back, oh, whenever (who'd have thought it, eh?!).

But, for me, this device created an ever greater divide. For it isn't really the fact of a past youth that makes many old people interesting (or, indeed, just as many very, very dull), it's the accumulation of all those inconceivably time-consuming years afterwards, coupled with the revelation that being old can come as something of a shock, even to the old. This was sweetly articulated by the undeniably mature 94-year-old Margaret (a pensioner, after all, for most of my blink-and-you'd-miss-it life) in the programme's opening moments: 'My astonished reaction in the last couple of years is how sudden old age is. You look in the mirror and there's a different face there, and it's not you any more... '

Through the Eyes of the Old indicated that the best thing about ageing is the possibility that, should one remain as fabulously sharp and articulate (and somehow become as insightful) as Margaret (or 95-year-old Chelsea pensioner, Archie, or 83-year-old Battle of Britain hero Sir Christopher, or '88-and-a -half'-year-old pet bereavement counsellor Rita), one wouldn't just fester patiently in an armchair in God's waiting room, but might never stop being thoroughly surprised and angry and excited and daunted by life. The stuff that, after all, makes being very young such a fabulous rollercoaster and, comparatively, can make being stuck in the middle seem like treading ditchwater.

The delightful Malcolm In The Middle (and it's not age he's in the middle of, but familial chaos) finally made its terrestrial debut on BBC2, though at a ridiculous hour.

Why Friday at 6.45pm when this is a kid's programme in the same way that South Park and The Simpsons are kid's programmes - (ie: almost wasted on them)? Young Malcolm is the product of an averagely dysfunctional American home - mom and dad may still be together but his older brother has been banished to military school after a crime spree ('my new roommate showed me how to kill mice with a hammer yesterday, so between that and the general atmosphere of simmering homoeroticism, I think I'm really starting to turn around...'). And, even worse, Malcolm is diagnosed as having an IQ of 165. Given that this means being transferred from his junior high school class to a programme for gifted kids, he not unreasonably reacts as though he's contracted a rare and terminal disease ('round here, being smart is exactly like being radioactive'). To compound the problem, on his first day he's stared at by the other little geniuses: 'So, I'm the freak of the freakshow?'.

Taut writing (by the fabulously named Linwood Boomer, who sounds like he might have suffered a bit at school himself) and very little of the glutinous sentimentality that often seeps into even the feistiest American comedy (The West Wing, for example) ensures that this is merely the latest US import to highlight - yet again - yawn - as if we needed it - how, although Britain can do funny, edgy populist TV, we can't often manage to do funny and edgy and populist all within the same half hour.

Clocking Off came pretty damn close, but it took 60 minutes. Life in and around Manchester's Mackintosh Textiles is so subtly woven, smartly written and inspiringly cast that I confess I was ever-so-slightly surprised when the last series turned out to be as big a ratings hit as it was a critical success. And its welcome return also serves to demonstrate how much of this year's BBC's drama output has failed to hit the spot. Even with a paedophile storyline - fast becoming a TV cliché - Clocking Off was a success partly because it wasn't afraid to depict the bad guy as a fully integrated member of the community, rather than as some shadowy but sinister local Lecter.

Initially, Kev was delighted when his divorced colleague Brian moved in across the road, but then Kev started using his binoculars and didn't much like what he thought he saw on Brian's computer screen. Torn between his suspicions and the hope that he might be wrong, Kev (Jack Deam in a powerfully understated performance) kept quiet but vacillated angrily in his day-to-day dealings with his friend. Which was probably exactly what would happen in a real life, as opposed to a telly life in which the dramatic imperative tends to be necessarily greater than any drive for authenticity.

Nonetheless, writer Paul Abbott's verisimilitude allowed for an ending in which Kev moved house without blowing the whistle on Brian, and that made a fine storyline even stronger.

Kev had a wedding coming up and, if he wanted a straightforward life, he needed to save his skin rather than go out of his way to be a hero. But one didn't necessarily end up thinking any worse of him for it, either - testament to the quality of the acting, the plausibility of a potentially tricky storyline and the likeability of Deam's Kev. The actor with the toughest job was Paul Oldham as Brian, whose plaintive entreaty when confronted about his activities as a youth club leader - 'It's a mess with that lot because they're up for a laugh and messing about. It gets confusing, Kev' - brought a rare glimpse of humanity to what could easily have been a cardboard cutout of a baddie.

That not all would-be have-a-go-heroes have it in them to realise their heroism (and that, yes, even paedophiles are human beings who might sometimes make you laugh despite yourself) is not obviously the stuff of prime-time hit drama, but then Clocking Off is rarely obvious.

In the denouement to the EastEnders Who Shot Phil Mitchell? plot, Lisa's sad, guilty eyebrows were the stars, wiggling up and down like the lines on a positive lie-detector test while Phil shoutily waved the shooter abaht.

Sadly, Lisa is too much of a tragic victim to make a really exciting wannabe-murderer, so I wish it had turned out to be, say, Dot wot dunit. Through The Eyes of The Old 's 94-year-old Margaret might well agree that there are just not enough pistol-packing OAPs on prime time. 'If I was physically fitter I'd be out on the streets, I'd break windows, I'd shout my head off!' would-be geronto-thug Margaret had declared. Well, I'm fairly sure she said 'shout'.