The Weekend's TV: The Last Enemy, SUN BBC1 George Melly's last stand SUN BBC2

Government control freaks who think that 360-degree surveillance is our only defence against terrorism don't obviously have a lot in common with civil-liberty paranoiacs who believe that we're sliding towards a Big Brother state, but they do share one thing: they both assume that the machines will work, that, unlike nearly every other complex technological system in human history, they won't be vulnerable to human error and inconvenient crashes at precisely the moment when you most need them. It's where the Venn diagram of the technological optimist and the technological pessimist overlaps, and nestled in that space you'll find quite a lot of thriller writers, too, whose fictions depend on always-on connections and the kind of network coverage that exists only in a mobile-phone salesman's fantasies. This is a world in which devices do what they're meant to do. Attach a mini video camera to a falcon's neck, for example, and it won't slip around to give you a bird's-eye view of a raptor's toes, but will deliver a pin-sharp image of your intended target, which you can then beam in real time to the PDA of a Government spook in No 10.

When Stephen Ezard, the hero of The Last Enemy, pressed his eye to the iris scanner at Heathrow as he returned for his brother's funeral, it recognised him instantly, rather than bleeping ineffectually and sending him to the back of the queue for a human eyeball to check him over, as the ones at Heathrow usually do. And so much time is spent tapping away at computer keyboards that you worry the hero will succumb to carpal tunnel syndrome before the villains even get close. We first encountered Stephen hooded and muzzled like a Guantanamo detainee, sat in the centre row on a long-haul flight. It turned out he is only the prisoner of obsessive-compulsive disorder (the blinkers and surgical mask simply a means of keeping the contaminating world at bay), but this psychological quirk meant that he was not ideally suited for the discoveries that he was about to make in his dead brother's flat. A woman was lying dying in one of the beds, and Stephen's later researches suggested that she had recently arrived from a Middle Eastern refugee camp that had been struck by a mystery illness. Understandably, Stephen washed his hands with urgency. Oddly, though, his terror of bodily contact fell away when he encountered his brother's widow and they fell to for a vigorous exchange of bodily fluids, without a wet wipe in sight.

The now-it-matters, now-it-doesn't aspect of his psychology also seems to apply to the ubiquitous surveillance and monitoring technology that prevails in Peter Berry's vision of a near-future Britain. Policemen carry guns and hand-held ID-card scanners, vehicles can instantly be tracked across the city, and Stephen's brother's residential apartment building is accessible only by swiping your ID first. And yet when Stephen had to get access to a corporate lab, he simply walked through the door and strolled around unchallenged. Where surveillance and security might be inconvenient to the plot, they simply disappear, which doesn't exactly reinforce the sense that they present a real threat.

The Last Enemy has a pretty good cast. Benedict Cumberbatch leads as the maths genius in the middle of the mille-feuille conspiracy, and Robert Carlyle sidles into frame at regular intervals (accompanied by ominous Dementor music) as an unexplained spook operating outside official channels. But they don't act as if they really believe a word they're saying, not always easy given the clunkier passages of Berry's script. When Stephen arrived late for his brother's funeral, one of the mourners said, "Still, at least you got here in time to throw dirt on the coffin... that's important", a line so weird that I spent some time wondering whether it was some kind of coded message. Nobody is underperforming on purpose: you can just see in their eyes that they don't think it's going to work out. The drama can't be faulted on its timing, incidentally, arriving at a time when we're inclined to believe that even the watchers are being watched, in a mirror-room recession of surveillance. But I'll be taking at least one pair of eyeballs out of the equation.

George Melly's Last Stand was a lovely film about dying of cancer. Following the final months of the jazz singer and raconteur, Katie Buchanan's film, like the recent Wonderland documentary about Norman Wisdom, was an example of the documentary as a kind of palliative care, offering the attention-addicted a reliable supply of their favourite drug to the very end. Melly himself was a trouper, treating the indignities of terminal illness as the raw material for insouciant wit. "Do you want the trousers off?" he asked his doctor before an examination. "No, that's fine," his specialist replied. "Nobody ever does these days," said Melly, with that characteristic gravelly chuckle. He made his exit in style.

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