Last Night's TV: The Ambulance, Channel 4Ann Widdecombe Versus Girl Gangs, ITV1No Heroics, ITV2

The Ambulance began with a weird tableau: a paramedic holding his own private rave in the back of an ambulance, hips whirling, hands waving over his head. After a few seconds, when the strangeness wore off, I realised he'd found the perfect venue, with flashing lights and pharmaceutical supplies en suite. Sorted.

The subtitle for this Cutting Edge film, "Eight Minutes to Disaster", was poorly chosen, compounded from two tangentially related truths. The first is that ambulances have been set a target by the Government of reaching the scene of an emergency within eight minutes (that's eight minutes from a 999 call being made, not eight minutes from the information reaching the ambulance crew). The second is that, for all the ambulance crew knows, any call could end in a disaster of some sort. But over the month that cameras accompanied ambulance 212 on its rounds in Reading, disaster turned out to be gratifyingly elusive. Fictions such as Casualty and ER place ambulances at the centre of continual drama, but the prevailing mood of this bitty but largely excellent film was one of slow-moving, mildly cynical comedy, and those occasions when drama did threaten mostly spiralled down into banality. Which is how things are supposed to work, and a tribute to the intelligence, skill and compassion of 212's crew: Paul, Iain, Stella and Vicky.

The tensest sequence in the entire film had 212 rushing to the aid of an elderly man who had collapsed and unable to locate the address – the house next to No 51 turned out to be 51A, and No 53 was nowhere in sight. After several minutes of driving round a labyrinthine housing estate, becoming more and more frustrated and anxious, they arrived at the house to find that, first, a fast-response car had beaten them to it – at least the target time had been met – and second, that the elderly man had been dead for hours, his corpse already cold. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

There were other moments when events were more straightforwardly dramatic: near the beginning, when Paul, the solitary raver, struggled to put a tube in the veins of an attempted suicide as the ambulance jolted through the streets at high speed (the man had cut himself too many times and anything Paul pumped in was likely to get pumped right out again); and, right at the end, when they rushed a five-year-old boy, hit by a car, to A&E (a voice-over postscript reassured us that a week later he was home). But most of an ambulance crew's duties are routine and tedious: taking little old ladies for medical appointments (often to the distress of the little old ladies, desperate not to be a bother), dusting down the local drunks when they fall over, and, far more depressingly, sorting out the Saturday-night bingers when they get ill or violent. The cameras listened in on the control room as the calls came in. "What's she doing now? She's dribbling? How much has she had to drink?" "Well, I don't have friends who punch me in the face." This is, the crew testified, the worst thing they have to deal with: a culture that has lost any sense of limits – on how much you drink, how hard you hit people, who you're allowed to hit (even when lives are at risk, emergency services have to take their chances).

The drinking culture was also under the spotlight in Ann Widdecombe versus Girl Gangs, in which the voice of common sense and bad hair went out on the lash with tough teenage girls in Birmingham and Brixton, to see if she could talk them out of their hard-drinking, hard-fighting lifestyles. The most interesting part was a conversation between Widdecombe and the south London girls, as Widdy put it, "normal, kindly women" who, once the subject of violence was raised, started admitting to carrying knives, offering to fetch guns for Ann and explaining that you should never walk away from a fight because it makes you look weak. But otherwise the clash of Ann's moral certainties and the girls' indifference to anything anyone else thought was not illuminating. I'm just baffled at the Portilloesque transformation of Widdy's image from stone-hearted harpy who chains up pregnant women prisoners for pure fun to media darling and fearless truth-speaker who you've got to respect for her principles. But I'd still rather have seen the programme the title promised: Widdecombe in the arena, in unarmed combat with 20 boozed-up teenagers. All right, maybe some of the teenagers could swing chains, just to even things out.

No Heroics is a sitcom about superheroes, set mainly in a bar where they all sit around drinking too much, talking about sex, and revealing their deep personal inadequacies. It is quite a nice idea, certainly a much better idea than My Hero, the one with Ardal O'Hanlon as Thermoman, but so far Drew Pearce's script is too ready to fall back on the drink and the sex every time it needs a laugh. It needs a good script editor to sort it out. That, or Ann Widdecombe.