Last Night's Television: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, BBC4; The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, Channel 4; Coronation Street, ITV1

Close to the end of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the rather curious title of Marina Zenovich's Storyville documentary finally became clear. Polanski, said a friend, was desired in France, where he lives and is lionised as an extravagantly talented film director, but wanted in America, his adopted homeland until he fled in 1978, having admitted that he'd had unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Gailey, but feeling that the US legal system was tilted against him.

Even closer to the end of this documentary, a clip was shown of Polanski being interviewed by Clive James, over a sumptuous lunch, presumably in Paris. It's not always easy, as I have found myself, to conduct an interview when you have jus de moules marinières running down your chin, but James had nevertheless given the illustrious director a suitably hard time over his predilection for inappropriate sex. Tiring of this line of questioning, the Puck-faced Polanski then asked, rhetorically: "Do you think there's something more to my life than relations with young women?"

It was a fair question, from a man whose biography would have given Tolstoy arm ache. It is a fair question for Zenovich, too. Fascinating as the 1977 trial was, and even though its repercussions continue to this day, it was surely not the defining episode of Polanski's tumultuous life, a life in which he has seen both parents carted off to concentration camps, suffered the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and, it's sometimes easy to overlook, made some indisputably great films.

Zenovich, in fairness, did not avoid these other aspects of Polanski's bizarre story. But the starters, main course and pudding of the thing was the trial, with everything else as so many amuses-bouches (forgive me if I have got a little carried away with the image of Polanski and James stuffing themselves). In this, she was greatly served by the happy fact that so many of the leading players are still alive and willing to talk, not least Gailey, now a middle-aged mother of three called Samantha Geimer, who believes – unlike some – that Polanski should be free to return to America without fear of arrest.

It may or may not be a coincidence that the man Zenovich presented as the real villain of the piece was the only major player no longer alive to offer his recollections. This was Judge Laurence J Rittenband, who was himself, we were told, not averse to sexual relations with much younger women (the rather significant difference being that his girlfriend when he was 54 was at least just out of, rather than just into, her teens). The more serious charge against Rittenband was that he was a publicity junkie, who had presided over Elvis and Priscilla Presley's divorce, and loved the reflected stardom. "He didn't care what happened to me or Polanski," said Geimer. And even the prosecuting counsel agreed that Polanski was ill-served by the judge, although I'm afraid I can't wholly explain how. I found the legal complexities of the case a little confusing, although I dare say the documentary will go down a storm in law schools.

For all that, it was classily shot and edited, and let us give thanks that Zenovich did not submit to one of the curses of our times – the dramatic reconstruction. For some documentary-makers, a blurred, jerky sequence in which a Polanski lookalike climbed into the jacuzzi with a naked teenager, would have been utterly irresistible.

Simon Block and Rowan Joffe, who respectively wrote and directed last night's The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, did things the other way round. The film, about the killing in Gaza five years ago of a 21-year-old British photography student, shot in the head by an Israeli Defence Forces sniper, was entirely dramatic reconstruction, with negligible use of actual news footage, and was all the better for it.

Whether there was perhaps a simplification of the situation that led to Tom Hurndall's death – Israelis bad, Palestinians good – is a question far too complicated for a simple TV reviewer, but the script was tight and convincing, and the performances exemplary (above all by Stephen Dillane, quite brilliant as Tom's lawyer father Anthony, whose relentless quest for justice forced the Israelis to order an independent review of the incident, and eventually to sentence the sniper, Taysir Hayb, to eight years in prison). Television can sometimes be a little self-consciously worthy when it tackles this kind of subject, but here it did the Hurndall family, and indeed the Palestinian cause, proud. The Israeli army, one feels, can probably look after itself.

It is real-life sniping in places like the Middle East that makes me decidedly ambivalent about the sport of paintballing, the more so after Coronation Street, in which Tony let Liam have it splat in the heart. This was apt, since Liam's heart has landed him in not so much a love triangle as a dodecahedron. It will all end messily, mark my words (and the words of every gossip magazine on the supermarket shelves).