Last Night's TV: Storyville: The Biggest Chinese Restaurant In The World, BBC4Imagine...Doris Lessing – The Hostess And The Alien, BBC1

Here's a dish that I don't think you're going to find on the BBC food website any time soon: fried live fish, as served up by the West Lake restaurant in China. First, wrap your left hand in a damp tea towel. Then select your live fish from a nearby bucket and descale with the edge of a cleaver, while holding the head on the chopping block (your main ingredient may be making vigorous attempts to escape). Slash each side a few times and then, still grasping the head firmly, immerse the flapping body into a wok filled with smoking hot oil for about 30 seconds. Lay fish on a serving plate and top with a chilli sauce. Ensure that the fish is still twitching before serving to your customers, since nobody's going to pay that steep fried-live-fish premium for the boring old fried dead fish that you can get everywhere else.

Rather unnervingly, that gruesome scene from The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World actually had competition when it came to images of animal distress. During a visit to a nearby duck farm that supplies the West Lake restaurant with some of the 150 birds it uses every day, the farmer demonstrated what he thought was the best way to kill them. Push bamboo chopstick through the breast of the bird, poke your finger into the hole and hook out the heart. Yank firmly to detach. "It's all down to sourcing," said Mrs Qin, the restaurant's terrifying proprietor, as she looked on approvingly. What mattered to her was the taste of the dish and the size of the profit that could be turned from it. But it didn't look as if her restaurant was exactly big on animal welfare.

In every other respect, though, it was massive, complete with a Guinness World Records certificate to acknowledge its status as the biggest restaurant in the world: 5,000 covers in all, located in a kind of Imperial Disneyland situated in the Hunanese town of Changsha. There were 300 cooks, wok burners like blast furnaces and a small army of waiters and waitresses, all identified by their separate regimental uniforms and drilled by Mrs Qin with martial songs. "Solidarity equals strength, strength is iron, strength is steel," they sang, somewhat listlessly, while Mrs Qin enthusiastically led from the front, zealously promulgating her own version of socialism with Chinese characteristics. In a lovely image, you saw her counting the proceeds of another capacity night at the West Lake, the portraits of Mao on the banknotes flicking through her fingers at dazzling speed. Mrs Qin, naturally, was a member of good standing in the local Communist Party, along with most of Hunan's other self-made millionaires. Eat your hearts out, Halliburton and Blackwater: when it comes to the profitable manipulation of government power, the Communist Party of China is the biggest cartel in the world, and Storyville's fascinating film gave you a glimpse of just what it can be capable of when it gets going.

Doris Lessing learnt that she had won the Nobel Prize when she returned home from shopping for groceries to find her doorstep besieged by journalists and press photographers. "Oh, Christ!" she said gloomily, when one of the assembled throng explained why they were all there, though she seemed to have cheered up a little by the time she reached the front door. She's since described getting the Nobel as a "disaster", her point being that all her free time is now occupied giving interviews about being a great writer, rather than doing great writing. Among her tormentors was Alan Yentob, working on an Imagine... profile of the writer, Doris Lessing – the Hostess and the Alien, which was loosely hooked to her latest book, Alfred & Emily, an inventive family memoir in which she confers alternative lives on her mother and father.

I approached the film a little warily, nervous that it might settle for the clichés of formidable old age, indifferent to social and cultural convention. I'd reckoned without Doris Lessing, whose entire life seems to have been conducted with a wild daring, and Jill Nicholls, the director, who crafted a compelling, even challenging, portrait of a completely original artist.

"I despise people who don't experiment with their lives," Lessing once wrote, and she unquestionably lived up to her own credo. You can't do such a thing, of course, without also experimenting with the lives of those attached to you, which in Lessing's case included the young children she abandoned when she walked out of her first marriage. Lessing got edgy when questioned about this, but it says something about the film that you felt persuaded of the necessity of her flight. And if you wanted proof of her poetic power as a fabulist, it came right at the end when she described a childhood memory of luring moths out of the African night with a hand smeared with honey, as good an image of the writer's talent for drawing things out of obscurity as you could want.

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