Waterloo Road (BBC1); The Trial Of Tony Blair (C4): It's small wonder that academic results are poor at Waterloo Road Comp as teachers spend more time arguing, snogging and drinking among themselves than being in the classroom.

Pupils have to educate themselves. A teenage boy asking a female classmate round to his house for extra tuition seems positive, then you hear him say, "if you fancy a French lesson, do you want to come round tonight?", and suspect the French aspect may involve kisses and letters.

He's only following the teachers' example. Acting head Jack Rimmer is getting drunk in the pub until Steph - a French teacher intent on cementing the entente cordiale - suggests going back to her place where there's a free bar. And a packet of pork scratchings too, I wouldn't mind betting.

Newlywed Tom is enjoying a night at home with estranged wife Lorna and pregnant mistress Izzie. All three teach at the school, which must make life in the staff room interesting.

Lorna jumped into the canal shortly after getting married but decided she was wet enough and has now inveigled her way into the Tom/Izzie love nest, insisting she wanted a fresh start. "This isn't starting a new life, this is crashing back into ours," fumes Tom.

Back at school, the new chair of the governors is wealthy Roger Aspinall, a former pupil who remembers his time there as "the worst days of my life". Now he's sponsoring the school financially and wants control of the blackboard in return.

"I need the right components to help this school take off," he says.

Those don't include old-style English teacher Grantly Budgen. Admittedly, he has his faults, such as falling asleep drunk at his desk in front of the class.

Worse than that, he taught Aspinall, calling him Roger the Bodger and the thickest pupil in the school. No surprise that Budgen's given his marching orders by the end of the first episode.

Waterloo Road comes from the people behind Bad Girls and Footballers' Wives but fails to reach the dizzy heights of absurdity of those series, perhaps hampered by its pre-watershed slot.

Perhaps it does want to make serious points about the budgets and results- obsessed educational system, but that gets lost in all the soapy happenings, emphasised by a cast plucked from other soap, hospital and police series.

The Trial Of Tony Blair was a "satirical comedy drama", a term covering a multitude of sins, most of them committed by our current Prime Minister.

It's 2010 and Blair finally stands down, letting Gordon Brown into Number 10 - although Cherie taking the lightbulbs when the Blairs move out was a bit mean.

The Blairs' new home turned out to be a mistake as it was in an area of London known as "Little Beirut", which, as Cherie pointed out, isn't the best place to live if your husband is hated by 250 million Arabs.

There were neat comic lines as Blair faced the prospect of a war crimes tribunal over the Iraq conflict. As satire, though, it didn't seem vicious enough.