Last Night's TV: Sorry, but you're not really my type

Arrange Me A Marriage, BBC2; 30 Rock, Five

Early on in Arrange Me a Marriage, Aneela Rahman, an Asian marriage broker, explained what's wrong with modern British courtship."You wouldn't,"she said,"buy a car or a house drunk, so why would you expect to find your life-partner like that?"I think that needs a bit of qualification: most couples I know experienced at least a couple of hours sobriety together between that first drunken grope over the tequila slammers and the moment when they were clinking champagne glasses over the wedding cake. Also, of course, there are legal impediments to buying a car drunk, or at least to driving it away afterwards, so it's hardly a fair comparison. And what alternative was Aneela proposing? Meeting your ideal partner as part of a reality-television matchmaking show and having your first snog on camera, with subsequent appearances in the Sunday papers and on GMTV to talk about your burgeoning love. As a basis for lifetime commitment, this has its drawbacks too.

But let's leave aside reality for a moment, and pretend that Arrange Me a Marriage has a serious point to make: this would be that the Western ideal of romantic love, which treats family and socio-economic circumstances as impertinent irrelevancies, isn't terribly practical. Far better, the programme suggests, to follow the Asian way, in which potential partners are sorted out by friends and family, enhancing the chances of finding somebody with the right sort of background, interests and temperament.

The first person to be subjected to Aneela's methods was Lexi Proud, a modern career woman with a sports car, a job that has something to do with chartered jets and reportedly involves the occasional lunch with Brad Pitt, and her own semi in Balham, south London, complete with back-garden jacuzzi. At 33, the only thing missing was"the right person", but so far, her trawl of management consultants and military types, met in bars and through websites, had turned up only sprats and sharks. With guidance from Aneela, a panel of friends turned up a couple of possibilities (but only a couple: you sensed that there was a point along the way when the producers thought they might not have a programme here at all). Aneela assessed suitability by talking to them with their parents, got Lexi to make a choice based on a file of info (no photo), and arranged an"Indian-style"party for the prospective couple to meet. Much to her own surprise, and the programme-makers'relief , Lexi fell for the nominated male like a ton of bricks, and they're reportedly still getting on like a house on fire.

So, score one for Aneela. But whether this proved any wider point about approaches to marriage in different cultures, I'm unsure. Lexi herself acted as if Aneela's approach was deeply repugnant to her, surprisingly, given that BBC guidelines forbid producers using threats of violence to get people on to these programmes; she was particularly hostile to inquiries about class and income, as if just asking the question amounted to an accusation of vacuous snobbishness. But even in shabby, informal Western cultures, people tend to marry people like themselves, people who have the same sort of background, education, career. As it was displayed here, the Asian way was just making this more explicit, and putting a bit of Bollywood music on the soundtrack. In fact, this was extremely like a number of other dating programmes in recent years, such as Channel 4's Perfect Match. If it made any point, it was the severe shortage of marriageable men or, perhaps, of men who are themselves interested in marriage.

This is also a point harped on in 30 Rock, Tina Fey's imported sitcom. Much of the humour revolves around the insistence of Alec Baldwin's soulless suit, Jack Donaghy, on directing thelife of our hapless heroine, Liz Lemon (Fey), head scriptwriter of the weekly TV comedy that has become part of Jack's corporate brief. A couple of weeks ago, this included matchmaking her with another woman, an easy mistake to make, Jack felt, given Liz's taste in shoes. In defiance of Jack, Liz has got back with her ex-boyfriend, a manchild who has based his career on the conviction that the mobile phone is a passing fad and the pager is the gadget of the future. Last night, Liz confided to the nurse at a blood-donation clinic that she was planning to break up with him. Nurse looked at medical records:"Thirty-five, single, no kids, three sexual partners in the last 10 years. I don't know, doll, maybe it's time to settle."

Not all the writing is sharp. The weekly plots about Liz's insecure actress friend Jenna (the annoying Jane Krakowski) and unpredictable star Tracy Jordan (the not unpredictable enough Tracy Morgan) are tiresome. But when Fey is on screen, she gets across beautifully the way that life just keeps up the pressure of life, keeps coming at you from different angles. And despite this, it's never tedious, all the anxiety is packed into a short, sharp 20 minutes. It's the most consistent pleasure Thursday- night TV has on offer.