In Network First: Breaking the Mirror ITV Tuesday the lugubrious antipodean – dressed all in white and wielding truth’s scalpel -

In Network First: Breaking the Mirror (ITV, Tuesday), the lugubrious antipodean – dressed all in white and wielding truth’s scalpel – set out to discover how the Mirror died, and who killed it. Once it was vigorous, lusty, combative – and full of John Pilger stories Now it is just smut, scandal and gossip. Why? It was down to the four “M”s: Maggie, Murdoch, Maxwell and Montgomery. Out of greed, megalomania, political spite or incompetence they had brought about the dumbing-down of British popular newspapers, depriving the workers of the information necessary to rise up and overthrow their corrupt masters.You see, concluded ol’ Pilge, actually people don’t want all this Sun crap.

For instance, all these young folk from Pimlico School, who sat down in front of the ascetic, priestly Pilger and told him that they abhorred all the Fergie rubbish, all the celeb-screws-celeb garbage, all the salacious twaddle. What they wanted to know about, presumably, was the plight of striking dockers in Liverpool, and reforestation in Cambodia.Did Pilger really believe them? Did he not think that they were wise enough to tell him what he wanted to hear? Did he not know that had Kelvin MacKenzie been sitting in his seat, the group might well have praised the Sun’s irreverence, its lack of seriousness, its “sense of fun”?And isn’t that genuinely sad? This week we have had cause to reflect on the role played by the Mirror, and that great, priggish Trot Paul Foot, in the quashing of the sentences of those men wrongly convicted for the Carl Bridgewater murder. They would never have made it without Footie’s persistence – and the old Mirror. But crusades no longer sell papers in Pimlico.Prisons do sell TV programmes, however – as long as they’re fictional. On Wednesday we had a prison that did not conform to small-screen notions of being banged away – as reproduced from Porridge to The Governor, via Prisoner: Cell Block H.

Insiders (BBC1) is from the Lucy Gannon stable, and Gannon’s success derives from eschewing the existing cliches of TV drama – then creating her own. No higher compliment can be paid.So Gannon’s prison is an open prison – ie prison, as run by the nursing staff of Holby High, all with lashings of empathy, difficult back- grounds and grainy hinterland. There is warder Woody – a high- testosterone version of Charlie Fairhead; attractive instructor Annie Whitby, who rehabilitates prisoners by thoughtfully parading on the beach clad in a tight tank-top and who has an imaginary boyfriend called Stephen at home in her seaside cottage; new, troubled screw Gerry; and loads of great prisoners.In episode one we focused on the twitches, slow self-recognition and complex psychology of army officer turned fraudster, Mark Gordon, played by Bill Nighy in a performance that would have graced any classic drama. His desperate semi- suicidal frolic in the sea with Ms Whitby was all the proof one needed that Gannon has managed that alchemy of creating a closed situation, which is nonetheless replete with possibilities.Just time to pay tribute, then, to the granddaddy of them all, the king of hinterland and the queen of gore. For last night saw the last in the current series of Casualty (BBC1). It opened with Charlie holding blood- spattered nurse Jude in his arms and bereaved ambulanceman Josh getting closer to the edge.