Pinochet In Suburbia (BBC2)

TV Heaven, Telly Hell (C4)

THE officer on duty at the front office desk must have thought a madman had walked into the police station when he said he'd come to report an international torturer and mass murderer, adding: "He's just down the road."

The accused was flat on his back - his bad back - following an operation in a London clinic. He wasn't any old patient but General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military dictator.

A holiday in this country was ruined by his back trouble and a prolonged court case in which moves were made to extradite him to Spain to face murder and torture charges.

This offered actors the chance to pretend to be politicians, with Michael Maloney as Jack Straw and Anna Massey as Baroness Thatcher. Once again, this threw up the matter of putting words into the mouths of real, still living, people. Did Straw really exclaim: "We've got Pinochet. We've got the bastard" on hearing that the general had been arrested.

And did Mrs T, taking tea with the general during his lengthy house arrest, look at the spread laid out on the table and chuckle: "I see my supplies made it across enemy lines."

The opening caption admitted the film was based on real events but that some scenes and characters were fictional. All the same, this peep behind the curtain of Pinochet's Surrey prison home (just down the road from Russ Abbot's place) where he was kept under house arrest couldn't help but be fascinating.

Derek Jacobi plays Pinochet as a wily old bird with a bad temper and no conscience. He did nothing to make us sympathise with him, even though the conditions of house arrest made the garden out of bounds and he had to be accompanied to the toilet. The general seemed to think that his wife not having her own bedroom was more of an inconvenience.

After much legal to-ing and fro-ing, not to mention political machinations, doctors declared him unfit to stand trial. There was, they said, no evidence to suggest he was faking his disability. He was allowed to return to Chile.

Six years later as he still awaits trial in Chine, some may feel that the wool was pulled over the eyes of his examiners. Proceedings will begin next year on tax fraud and embezzlement charges - not human rights abuses.

TV Heaven, Telly Hell is a variation on Room 101 in which Sean Lock, in the Paul Merton host role, gets a celebrity to reveal his TV loves and hates. The entertainment value lies in the awful clips and the repartee between Lock and his guest, this week comedian and actor Alan Davies.

Shows about vets were a pet hate. I sympathised when I saw the clip of a cat whose intestines were being examined by a vet. Either that or he was preparing Cumberland sausage for his tea.

Davies was prepared to laugh at himself, nominating The British Comedy Awards as a dislike because of something that happened to him at the ceremony. The year the organisers announced a fancy dress Latin theme, he turned up as a matador - only to discover that no-one else had made the effort to dress up.

It was a disastrous evening. "I didn't win, got drunk and people kept throwing things at me trying to knock my hat off," he recalled.