Last night's television - Find Me a Family, Channel 4; Ideal, BBC3; Storyville: Up For Debate - Team Qatar, BBC4

Ideal is in its fifth series now, and it has developed into a seriously good sitcom. The sit is solid. Moz, a small-time dope dealer played by Johnny Vegas, never leaves his squalid Salford flat. And the com is full of incident, because Moz's life is marked out by the comings and goings of a motley crew of customers, family, neighbours and business associates, actual and potential, and many of them are bigger crooks than he is. In the last series, Moz's new girlfriend, Jenny, an intellectually neglected childminder who had a baby by one of her charges, was shot in a "drug-related incident". Last night, she sat, propped up by pillows, in the couple's bedroom, sticking plaster affixing a tube through her nose, and in a persistent vegetative state. Poleaxed by guilt, Moz had given up dealing. None of his associates was eager to accept this inconvenience.

Ideal has never made much of a claim to conventional social realism. One neighbour, known only as Cartoon Head, for example, is never seen without the mouse-mask that is superglued to his head. He began an affair with Judith in a previous series, when for a time she sported a wasp-mask herself. But the affair has not progressed well. No wonder. Cartoon Head is a satire on the strong, silent type. His strength resides in his profession, as a hit-man, and his silence is that of a man who needs to communicate nothing, because all those around him do what he wants, out of fear. The fantasy element of Ideal has now been ratcheted up a little further, because Jenny, in her coma, projects strange song-and-dance routines into the action, reminiscent of dream-sequences in The Sopranos. Oddly, however, the unrestrained flights of fancy in Graham Duff's scripts capture better than any amount of grimly sociological exegesis the reality of circumscribed lives.

All of the characters live out fantasies of some sort, of violence, of sexual perversion, of sartorial flamboyance, of romance or of pop stardom. Even Mos lives out a fantasy, of basic decency and normality, and sets himself up as an oasis of calm, wisdom and sanity.

Mos tried to coax Jenny out of her coma via the most mundane fantasy vehicle of all, the reading of celebrity-gossip magazines. He hoped that something she really cared about would touch her, like hearing of a "glamorous weathergirl seen with a sweat-mark on her shirt". Here is quiet desperation, surrounded by the psychotic, scary, who-gives-one flamboyance it can nurture.

Those kinds of lives were only glimpsed at in Find Me a Family, a three-part documentary series fronted by David Akinsanya, a broadcaster who entered the care system as a new-born baby, never to emerge. His idea was that people seeking to adopt could be persuaded to take hard-to-place children – the damaged, the disabled, those in large sibling groups, ethnic minorities – if only someone like him would work with them on opening their minds.

His first guinea pigs were Cathy and Richard Smith, a likeable young couple who'd had their nine-year-old daughter Rachel using IVF and had been unable to conceive again. Richard burst into tears when Akinsanya showed him footage of a little girl whose face showed signs of Down's. The realisation that he was the kind of man who would reject a child because she didn't "look right" was a horrible revelation for him.

Akinsanya didn't give up, though, and after much persuasion, including a day spent with a dance troupe that had many members with Down's, the family's fears had been greatly assuaged. They did go on to adopt the girl they had seen, although her identity was obscured for broadcast, because this deeply neglected child, who had so many siblings that they had to be separated for adoption, had been taken involuntarily, and there was "a risk of her being identified by her birth family". Perhaps those charmers work as script advisors on Ideal.

Storyville: Up for Debate – Team Qatar occupied an entirely separate part of the social landscape, one in which aspiration, and winning, was paramount. So keen was the small, super-rich emirate of Qatar to join the global intellectual elite that its queen hired a team of alumni from the Oxford Debating Society to coach six of its schoolchildren for the World Debating Championships. This is by no means unusual, apparently, and the young graduates recruited to train Qatar had already honed their skills by working with a number of other national teams.

Their experience showed, as the six chosen teenagers moved quickly from being narrow-minded, emotionally incontinent gabblers, to well-informed and liberal thinkers, able to see, and make, all sides of any ethical argument. Team Qatar didn't get through the first round of the competition. But they were by far the most successful new team ever to have taken part. This was very good for the CV of their trainer-in-chief, a focused former president of the Oxford Union whose chief passion, other than debating, was novelty socks. He'll go far, I fear.