TELEVISION / Fostered by Kafka and stolen by The System

IN A week that was long on hankies and short on hope, Bad Girl (BBC2) wiped the smile off your face before taking a skewer to your heart. Guy Hibbert's compelling ScreenPlay offered a variation on the maxim 'Life's a bitch and then you die': Life's a dog and then the social services come round.

Maggie Hunt (Jane Horrocks), a single mother from Oop North, makes a bit of extra brass as a nightclub singer. We see her totter home through a peeling urban dawn to the barge where her boyfriend and baby lie sleeping. Ben peeps out over a cot quilt stained strawberry by the fresh gashes on his face. Maggie runs back up the towpath with Ben cuddled in her coat; one of those sickening, lurchy, heart-bursting-your-ribs runs. Cut to the case conference - the furrowed nods of the social workers, the doctor, the policeman. It feels like a post-mortem: not for Ben, but for Maggie's rights as a mother.

Bad Girl has roots in the scorched, no- person's land of Cathy Come Home: a bolshy working-class girl refuses to be cowed by a pious, middle-class authority. But Hibbert gives it a new spin by having Maggie eagerly co-operate in self-improvement to get Ben back. The boyfriend is chucked, the barge is exchanged for a tower-block cell with bumper-to- bumper cockroaches, the fierce ponytail for something soft done with Carmen Rollers. But the tragic machinery is already cranked up. Maggie does the Tebbit thing and gets on her bike, only to find it padlocked to an iron destiny.

The despair you can bear, it's the hope you can't stand: the solicitous new Kiwi lover who turns out to be an Ugly fruit, the hearing where the judge restores custody and the social services appeal. Maggie pushes on like some Dorothy Perkins Sisyphus, just getting the rock to the top of the hill when the weasel men tell her that it isn't the size they wanted. When she finally slaps Harris the social worker (Nicholas Woodeson), she has been driven to the violence of which he long ago convicted her.

Bad Girl ran the risk of all social-concern drama - plays that on paper look like searing indictments of The System and end up as boo-hiss Socialist Worker panto. The social workers (finely played by Woodeson and Lesley Manville) transcended the devil-in-a-Deux-Chevaux stereotype, leaving you in no doubt as to what it's like to be in a job where one lapse of judgement puts a baby in a burns unit. But subtlety went hang at a ghastly dinner party where Maggie, cooking and waitressing, is taunted by some jolly unsporting P G Wodehouse toffs.

When Harris confronted his boss saying: 'Because we haven't got resources to supervise difficult working-class children, is it now policy to pack them off for adoption to nice middle-class homes?' we didn't need a subtitle to know this was The Message. But it took Jane Horrocks to make it flesh. Her Maggie was a defiant spindle of a woman, only fear could teach her compliance. She has an unlikely face, but it holds your attention; the waxen skin, the puddles where there should be eyes, the broad mouth that widens into a sarky grin or puffs up in sorrow. Horrocks is not afraid to be ordinary: she never looks as if she comes out of Woolworth's via Rada. A lesser actress would have made Maggie more sympathetic and sunk the play in sentiment.

Bad Girl felt like your terror and pity quota for the year, but then In With Mavis (C4) featured the tragedy of Alzheimer's. Mavis Nicholson's parents both had the illness, so she was better equipped than most to spend the day with Ewart and Diana Myer. Nine years ago Diana, a potter, began forgetting. Ewart, a boffiny fellow with a huge beard and stern spectacles, did well describing the glaze that has since washed over his wife's mind. And Mavis's questions were exemplary, drawing out but never tugging, and only prompting tears when she offered some pain of her own: 'I can't easily cope with mourning somebody who's alive. I'm wondering how you stand up to the strain?' 'Well, I suppose I deceive myself. I know I shall never see Diana again, if you know what I mean.' Oh, death in life, the days that are no more.

Over in Barcelona (BBC1), in the shadow of a silver-scaled dragon's house, a big Australian was taking a dekko at art deco. 'The Catalans were inventing tradition,' Robert Hughes said, peering up at a Gaudi hallucination preserved for all time in mosaic. Hughes looks like Rod Steiger and talks like an angel; well an angel that's spent a lot of time grounded in a saloon bar. Ten years ago The Shock of the New gave us a first glimpse of his large, impatient mind, and established him as our leading bruiser of culture. As Time magazine's art critic, Hughes moves in a world where they speak a language as precious as the eggshell vanities of its practitioners. But although he has its grammar like a native, he still packs a colloquial punch, deploying an Anglo- Saxon word to cut the Latin crap. As an insider, but only on a visitor's passport, Hughes is the best kind of guide; knowledgeable, questioning, enthusiastic. Hunched and watchful in the front pew of a Barcelona church, he took in 'the solemn grove of octagonal columns around the apse'. As the camera swept across a high oriel window blinking jewel colours, he said: 'This rational and ambitious building lifts yer heart.'

Barcelona got off to a slow start. Hughes seemed weighed down by the bulky brief - history, culture, contemporary politics, the Olympics. The camera spent a lot of time mooning over the city, producing shots of red taillights at night straight out of the 'I Love You Mrs Jones' diamond commercial. Sometimes it downright contradicted Hughes's commentary. When he talked about a church's 'virile, bony structure' it gave a fish-eye view of the nave as flaccid as a fat lady in a swimming costume. But at the Sagrada Familia, Hughes hit his stride. The Sagrada is what you would get if you asked Ravenscraig to run up a house for Cruella de Vil. While finding the poetry for its strangeness ('Vertical tunnels carrying their darkness into the sky'), Hughes didn't spare the sculptor responsible for recent decorations: 'These are the climax of his career and they could hardly be worse. Obstinate kitsch overlaid with the clumsiest of modernist cliches . . . It is rarely wise to underestimate the taste of the truly pious.'

Unlike Judith Chalmers, Hughes succeeds in making you wish you were there, preferably with him. He was last seen pushing a trolley through the new airport, appraising the talents of its architect who had planted palm trees and failed to provide ventilation: 'So there they are, dying one by one.' Then there was the small problem with the building giving the radar false echoes which meant no one could identify the planes. 'Apart from that, he did a fine job.'

Hughes was pipped to Exit of the Week by Frankie Howerd. In Frankie On . . . Call (ITV), he gave an audience of hospital staff his views on medicine. 'A man in our road went to Amsterdam for a sex-change, paid pounds 2,000, came back without a sausage. I'm a bit poorly meself. Woke up this morning and felt funny. Whaddya mean, about time?' Three days after filming he died. The routine was as familiar as laughing: the droopy basset- hound jaw, the roll of the eyes and hand on the hip to express indignation, the sibilant catchphrases ('Lisssen, no lissssen'), the mock solemnity. Punchlines were never the point of Frankie's jokes; they went round the houses, down the trousers, up the whasssits. You knew what was coming, but never lost the pleasure of seeing it arrive. He was a prince among fools. Nay, madam, nay.