Last Night's Television - Prescott: The Class System and Me, BBC2; Spooks, BBC1

Where John Prescott is concerned, opinion divides into two camps: there are those who think he's ridiculous and awful, and those who think he's plain ridiculous – a sentence-mangling, two-Jags-driving, croquet-playing, secretary-shagging, punch-throwing clown. Prescott: the Class System and Me probably won't do much to shift anybody's views, but last night's first episode at least provided a reminder that clowns are human, and their views not necessarily clownish.

The premise of Amanda Blue's pair of films is that Prescott has been "obsessed" with class all his life, and that she is out to discover whether he is right, or whether class is a thing of the past. It's worth noting how very loaded the terminology is, obsession being by definition irrational. From the outset, the programme seemed predisposed to treat class as a source of broad comedy, setting Prescott up in a series of encounters with the extremes of the class system. A better title would have been "The Class System and Him", since it never felt as though he had initiated any of the programme. First of all, he was taken, along with Mrs Prescott, for lunch with the Earl of Onslow, an Eton-educated Tory peer, who tried to persuade Prescott that class doesn't really matter any more; why, his own gamekeeper holidays in South Africa. In any argument about class and privilege, Prescott is at an automatic disadvantage, being himself the supreme counter-example: a working-class lad who left school without qualifications and ended up Deputy Prime Minister. Lord Onslow worked that angle mercilessly, repeating how much he admired Prescott for having worked his way up (and reassuring him that he had been unfairlyattacked for playing croquet). Prescott seemed unsure how to cope with so much soft soap, and didn't manage an effective counter-attack. There was more embarrassment at the Hay Festival, where Prescott was sat down to argue with the sketch writer Simon Hoggart, who has compiled an entire book of Prescottisms. To Prescott, sneering at the way he talks is pure snobbery; to Hoggart, class doesn't enter into it. As far as I could see, both were adopting views that are in part defensible but largely self-serving.

A trip to Henley Regatta, to admire the blazers and the glasses of Pimm's, seemed redundant after this, a way of re-emphasising Prescott's discomfort in his own skin. The only really revealing and interesting encounter was with three teenage girls described by Blue as "chavs", a term that she was forced to explain (not very adequately) to Prescott. Despite being profoundly ignorant of politics – when Prescott asked them what they thought of Gordon Brown, they demanded "Who's Gordon Brown?" – they did know that he'd hit a bloke once, and felt this gave them something in common: the loudest of the girls had been thrown out of school for assaulting a teacher. Prescott was startled to hear this girl describe herself as middle-class; he would regard her as working-class. She corrected him: "I don't work." Their meeting showed the qualities that have made Prescott an effective politician: a genuine curiosity about and empathy with ordinary people, even if in this case the empathy seemed to be based a little too heavily on self-justifying anecdotes about violence. It showed, too, how outdated his view of class is, at least in some respects: the self-identifying proletariat from which he sprang barely exists any more. At the same time, it was undeniable that class had shaped these girls' lives in enormous and mostly malign ways, engendering their constant sense of being looked down on and the self-evident gap between their sparky intelligence and their dismal school records.

What made the programme really instructive and pleasurable was the presence of Mrs Prescott, Pauline, whose gentle fretting over correct form (is it "toilet" or "lavatory"? How do you tell an earl his flies are undone?) and unselfconscious pleasure in the perks of high office provided a constant stream of nuance, with occasional undertones of Alan Bennettish comedy. Her unaffected awareness of the niceties told you far more about the pervasiveness of class than John's exaggerated bulldog snarls. Early on, the microphones caught her worrying to John: "God, I hope we don't come across as the Hamiltons. I'd die." Well, no, they came across as a very sweet couple who don't know how to handle their good luck. She can't stop being grateful, he can't stop distrusting it. There's something to be said for both points of view.

Spooks is back, with its cast of upper-middle-class types once more saving the nation. This week, homegrown Islamic extremists, in alliance with Russians, were threatening to murder a kidnapped soldier unless Remembrance Day ceremonies were abandoned. The Prime Minister, via a weaselly civil servant, wanted to give in, but top spook Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones) defied them in Churchillian terms – "No fanatic with a sword is going to stop us honouring our dead" – pointing out that the Queen would never allow such a thing. I find the world-view presented here, with its nasty Muslims, spineless democratically elected politicians and secret agents who are magically representative of the true soul of the nation, deeply repellent. At the end, Carter got blown up, which was supposed to be a shock. I don't think I'd have been bothered even if I'd been remotely convinced.

Brian Viner is away