Last Night's Television - Famous, Fich and Jobless, BBC1; Jobless, BBC1

Immediate benefits

The unemployed have to get used to absorbing useless advice from people still in work, so I hesitate only momentarily before passing on the helpful tips about job seeking gleaned from
Famous, Rich and Jobless. Number one is this: if you're down to your last £39 and desperate for a bit of casual work, try to make sure that you have a camera crew in tow. It really can be invaluable. When you beg and plead with stallholders or publicans or builders, you see, they know that their responses are being put on public record, and it can make the difference between a rejection and 50 quid in your pocket at the end of the day. Tip two – and I realise that this isn't going to be practical for everyone out there – is to be a minor celebrity. Again, this can tip the balance between on-your-bike-mate and a few hours' residency as curiosity of the day.

I exaggerate, but only a little. A variation on an earlier format that introduced the well-heeled and well-insulated to the grinding realities of homelessness, Famous, Rich and Jobless maroons four minor celebrities in Britain's unemployment hot spots, giving them one-star accommodation and just four days' worth of Jobseeker's Allowance to feed themselves and pay the bills. And there's one glaringly obvious difficulty. Whereas it was frighteningly easy for the well-known to disappear into the invisibility of the gutter, everyone here has to negotiate with the public to get a job. And as soon as they're recognised the purity of the experiment is compromised. "What's this in aid of?" asked a bemused builder, after Diarmiud Gavin had pleaded with him for a few hours' cash-in-hand work. It's in aid of a telly programme, pal, and suddenly the probabilities change.

Which isn't to say that it was entirely without a purpose. The point of these exercises is to take ill-considered prejudices and rub their noses in reality. "It seems quite easy to fiddle the system and get yourself a nice life," said Meg Matthews at the beginning, but it seemed a little less easy to her after four nights in Ebbw Vale, making ends meets with fag-end jobs. She did find work (thank you, camera crew and the self-belief she still had in the tank), but it didn't pay a lot and she didn't appear in any hurry to pay back her "benefits" money. Emma Parker Bowles ("I've never had a problem getting a job... I've sometimes had a problem keeping one") also got a crash course in life on the dole, where paying the bus fare to get to a job interview may count as a major investment. And with one exception, everyone present obligingly learnt the lessons they been intended to learn – that joblessness grinds you down.

The exception was the actor Larry Lamb, who believes that society has lost the work ethic. It took Larry about half a day to lose his, after one discouraging conversation with a man in a charity shop. He essentially gave up there and then. "This is looking for a needle in a haystack," he said gloomily. After which he seemed to calculate that he could survive perfectly well on benefits and went to seek work by taking a long walk on Hartlepool beach, where he was outraged to be confronted by the stunt's organisers, who pointed out that he'd reached the stage of furious hopelessness without actually passing through the intervening months in which you fruitlessly look for work. His ready capitulation to circumstance made something of a pointed contrast to the courage showed by Emma Parker Bowles, so unnerved, as a recovering alcoholic, at the prospect of working in a pub that she had to vomit into a nearby privet before pushing through the doors.

Later in the evening, Jobless approached the same subject in the old-fashioned way. No telly celebrities, no challenges, no proxy-adventures. Just real lives suddenly sideswiped by redundancy, which in several cases seemed to have pulled out from a blind junction. What gave Brian Woods's film its real poignancy was the children, dimly aware of the weight bearing down on their parents ("I know she's crying because she, like, gets a different coloured face," said Natasha of her mum) and yet blithely confident that things would get better. It had its moments of Blitz-spirit humour. "We'll sit with just a candle, but I'm not going to lose this house," declared Gary firmly. "I sold all the candles at the car-boot sale," chipped in his partner from the sofa. It also had a lot of tears, from people who didn't expect to cry but suddenly found that they couldn't stop themselves. Unfortunately, the review copy decided to stop working halfway through, so I never got to find out what happened to Derek and Elma and Andy and the others. Which was a pity, because Woods's film had already made them matter.