Last Night's Television - Georgia's Story – 33 Stone at 15, BBC1; The Hospital, Channel 4

It was the right day for
Georgia's Story – 33 Stone at 15. In the morning, The Sun had carried the headline, "Fatties Cause Global Warming", having decided, presumably, that "Fatties Murder Polar Bears" might be pushing it. Just over a week ago, as it happens, it had a Georgia story too. In a canonical example of one of the great tabloid clichés, she had been photographed in a pair of her old pants, hauling the waistband out in front of her to demonstrate that she was half the girl she used to be. No longer "Tragic Georgia", as she had been in an earlier piece, but "Battling Georgia", a poster girl for self-improvement. Between these widely space brackets is where the obese reside in the tabloid imagination: fatties as reprehensible monsters of indulgence, crushing the planet because of their desire for just one more KFC Variety Bucket and the fatty as get-a-grip heroine.

The BBC's film followed Georgia to Wellspring in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a weight-loss boarding school that had – for reasons which were never quite explained – offered her a year's scholarship. In Wales, Georgia was in serious trouble, caring for an overweight and invalid mother, and committing slow-motion suicide by ingestion. Georgia thought it had all started at the age of five, after the early death of her father, but I don't think Georgia had been looking at the family photographs closely enough, since the snapshot of her enjoying an ice cream with her dad showed a child already well on the way to obesity. Whatever the causes, though, Georgia's jaws had since done a sterling job of building on that stocky foundation.

The sweet thing about Georgia's Story was the way that it confounded your cynicism. You braced yourself for an explosive collision between homesick teenager and American therapeutic homilies, for a litany of self-exculpating excuses, for depressing setbacks when Georgia returned home for the Christmas holidays, and then, slowly, you unbraced yourself again, as it became clear that sticking power and character certainly weren't among Georgia's problems. If she did have any brat-camp outbursts you didn't see them here, and although Wellspring's weighing scales couldn't initially go high enough to register her weight it wasn't long before the digits were steadily ticking downwards. While her schoolfriends stalled or slipped back during the vacation, Georgia lost a further five pounds, getting up at 6.30am to put in her 10,000 steps a day minimum. You could see confidence and pleasure reappearing on her face as the mask of fat melted away.

Some of the cynicism came as a result of watching The Hospital earlier in the evening. It's the final part of Channel 4's glum series about how the National Health Service is being bent to the point of breaking by the fecklessness of modern society. The Sun would have headlined this story, "Lying Fatties Crushing the NHS", because it dealt with a consultant who specialises in the surgical insertion of willpower, also known as a gastric band. The film followed three cases and was, initially at least, a positive fiesta of self-denial and responsibility-dodging. "It's just the way I'm built," said one woman, pudgy fists wrapped round one of the three bulging sandwiches she'd just made herself. "The worse thing to do is forbid yourself," said another, having dimwittedly discarded the essentials of diet advice and held on to the sugar coating. "I try [diets] for months on end and they just don't seem to work for me," said yet another, convinced, like everyone here, that they had confounded the basic laws of physics by converting thin air into fat cells. For all three women, the gastric band seemed to offer a way of short-cutting their own hopelessly flabby sense of resolution.

The Hospital posed a crude question. Is it better for us all to cough up now for gastric-band operations because it'll save us money in the long run, or does the availability of the operation on the NHS actually diminish the likelihood that people will sort themselves out? Tellingly, the evidence of this film (hardly a scientific survey) hinted that the latter might be the case. Charlie got the operation, despite the fact that she'd prepared for it by eating HobNobs and MacDonald's fast food. But, denied an early appointment for a band, Paula and Holly started to lose weight the slow, steady way, by eating less and exercising more. Charlie's £6,000 operation will only work if she materially changes her lifestyle as well, something she showed absolutely no evidence of doing, outside of the restraint the gastric band forces on her. Paula and Holly's health improvements came at a sixth of the cost, and with a sense of personal achievement and command of their lives thrown in for free. Like Georgia, they'd lost the fat that was dragging them down and bulked up where it really mattered, in the sense that their bodies were their responsibility before they were anybody else's.