At a time when the BBC has defamed the Head of State by showing her cross when she wasn't, cruelly deceived little children on Blue Peter, encouraged people to compete when the competition was over, and when it whips itself like a penitent friar with a sheaf of investigations - in the depth of this misery, it shows in a week or so a fistful of films of such thought-provoking intensity that any other broadcaster would be proud to announce them as a year's output. And more, it "Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe", scattering the pearls about the nether reaches of BBC2 and BBC4 (the channel for people who don't watch TV), often late at night, with a minimum of publicity: a typically authoritative film by Andrew Marr on How to Be a Good Prime Minister aired at 11.30pm on BBC4.

The "Why Democracy" series is what TV can be when it rises to the challenge that time and chance have bequeathed it: to show us our world, in terms that leave us eager to argue, transforming us from couch potatoes to sofa philosophers. It makes much else seem tawdry: not just the celebrity mush with which TV's (and our) channels are clogged, but also the telegraphic and conflict-laden news and the compressed, surviving current affairs programmes that seek to roll up the universe into a cliché (yet, the channel controllers would say, this is what people want: is this not democracy? It is the central question facing journalists today, and there is no answer here).