TELEVISION / Red in the face and pink in the flamingo: Thomas Sutcliffe watches Dennis Potter's Lipstick on Your Collar and comes out humming the tunes

Whatever else he is, Dennis Potter is certainly Britain's most irascible television playwright (a title for which there is stiff competition), a man who even on a good day can make Victor Meldrew look like Ronald McDonald. His idling state, on the evidence of interviews and his drama, is one of infuriation, rising at moments of stress to raging contempt and near-apoplexy.

He lost his temper in the Sixties, when anger was a gilt-edged stock, but he has suffered a little recently from the notion that genuine rage, healthy rage, never lasts for long. During the Eighties it was easy to dismiss his fury as something that had soured or been artificially preserved. Now the times may be better suited to him again, delivering a combination of political incompetence and complacency which is oddly reminiscent of the late Fifties; in a week when the Prime Minister could publicly call for 'less understanding' on an important matter of social policy you're bound to wonder whether it isn't time that young men - or anyone for that matter - got angry again.

Which only pushes the nagging question of why one of television's most inventive and proudly feral writers is venting his fury on the social attitudes of thirty years ago. Lipstick on Your Collar (C4, Sunday) opens in a Whitehall office, heavy with matutinal boredom, in which the dreary processing work of military intelligence is taking place. Private Hopper is translating useless passages from Izvestia ('Army footballers must play better') while his senior officers labour to draw up the Soviet battle order. Potter himself worked as a language clerk, so we must take it that the bullying pantomime of military procedure is accurate rather than a dramatic equivalent to the stagy theatrical flats you see through the office window. Into this stifled, acidic world is delivered Private Francis, a gauche Welsh boy with a stutter, a taste for Pushkin and an unsmirched soul. When tedium or desire reaches a critical point (what an advertising executive might call 'that Potter moment') the lights flare or blush and we launch into a lip-sync version of a rock 'n' roll hit. In other words we're on familiar ground - ennui, class-rigidity, the extraordinary potency of cheap music.

This is dependably pleasurable - the sudden swoon of bureaucrats doing the hootchy-cootchy, the way that familiar lyrics are pressed into service for particular private fantasies, the sense that all of life can be made a cue for a song. And Potter also manages to insinuate some lighter comedy into the clash of insult and threat that constitute most of the dialogue; Peter Jeffrey's Colonel Bernwood swears, with old-school delicacy, in acronyms and Private Francis' first name (Francis) presents a knotty problem for senior officers bent on avoiding familiarity. But by the end of last night's episode some questions remained that will only be answered when we've seen more: didn't some of these scenes overstay their welcome, as though unsure that we would get the point unless it was repeated several times? And isn't Giles Thomas's performance as Private Francis simply too gormless to engage our sympathies?

In Adventures (C 4) on Saturday the American naturalist Robert Perkins set out to canoe from Greenwich to Aberdeenshire, notionally on the trail of his family roots. Normally he travels through the Canadian outback, video camera mounted on the front of his craft, maundering about pollution and the beauties of nature, so a voyage in which he would probably never be more than two miles from a Happy Eater seemed a slightly dubious enterprise. 'I get the feeling people here think I'm a little odd,' he said setting out, and if not it wasn't for want of trying. He carries with him a plastic flamingo to erect outside his tent every night, a studied piece of eccentricity that went hand in hand with some grumpy anti-industrialism. You wouldn't have watched this for his commentary (the Thames is 'a beautiful blue thread stitching it's way through the green landscape') or the perceptions about British society, but it had its moments - he had more success hitching with his canoe than you would have credited and, once he'd cleared the floes of burger-boxes in the canals of Birmingham, the twilight tranquility of Scotland put the tundra to shame.

Perkins' only threatening encounter with wildlife was when he was attacked in the rear by an inquisitive goose. Somehow, though, wildfowl don't quite cut it as predators, at least when they travel alone. This was the problem with last night's Screen Two (BBC 2) in which the central threat was a diabolical cormorant. The best scene in the whole thing was the tongue-in-cheek moment when the obsessed hero (who had inherited the bird along with a remote Welsh cottage) lay in his bath humming a doomy Jaws suspense tune and a plastic Donald Duck suddenly surfaced through the foam. The Cormorant was partly about inappropriate laughter, but couldn't evade its own even by this acknowledgement of the possibility. It was beautiful to look at, nicely written and well-acted, but somehow the stealthy flap of webbed feet never summoned up a moment's terror, and without that your laughter was never nervous, just a relaxed chuckle.