I once, and only momentarily, silenced a dinner party of war correspondents. This, I can tell you, is hard for a mere TV critic to do when all around are boasting about their latest outings to Helmand and how they met Gaddafi. I had simply said that, contrary to the usual assertion that we are all hideously biased when it comes to the Middle East, most of us are, in fact, hideously neutral about it, regarding it much as Southerners do the rivalry between Everton and Liverpool or Rangers and Celtic - unfortunate, intractable, dangerous, wrongs on both sides, nothing to do with us, boring.

From The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall you would gather that this was broadly the view of the Hurndall family when, five years ago, their 21-year-old son Tom, a budding photojournalist, announced that he was going to the Gaza Strip. (In fact, in real life, his mother Jocelyn knew Israel quiet well). Within days, Tom had joined the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led organisation that stages non-violent protests against the Israeli occupation. In one of the drama-doc's few concessions to art, it repeatedly flashed back to Tom, rucksacked up in the hall of his family home, his mother (Kerry Fox) sitting silently in another room. Her distress at his going and his determination to do so robbed them of the parting they owed each other. Instead, Jocelyn endured an agonising farewell over many months as she nursed her brain-dead son, shot by an Israeli army sniper on his very first day in Rafah.

One of the subtleties of Simon Block's unsensational script was that it made clear the subtle prejudices the most non-partisan Brit harbours towards Israel. Like the Hurndalls, we expect higher standards of Israel than wartime Israel expects of itself. The British military attaché Tom Fitzalan-Howard (Mark Bazeley, whose suave, articulate presence was essential to the film's momentum) warns Tom's father: “This is the toughest neighbourhood on earth. Israel goes to bed with its shoes on and two guns underneath the pillow.” Anthony Hurndall replies: “Tom was shot helping children. I don't care how f***ing tough the neighbourhood is. This shouldn't be allowed to happen.”

And it is Anthony who emerges a greater hero from this story than even his son. Played in a very minor key by Stephen Dillane, he is not easy to like. Divorced from his wife, emotionally constipated, he is fond of uttering his own name down the phone and almost arrogant in his belief that he can shame the Israeli Government with nothing more than his carefully excavated truth. His ex-wife Jocelyn is not initially enamoured by his approach. “Forgive me,” she says. “I am just wondering how being a commercial property lawyer in London equips you for going head to head with the Israeli Army.”

Yet it turns out he has exactly the right stuff. His forensic eyewitness interviews face down the lies and prevarications of the Israeli authorities and result in the prosecution of the sniper Sergeant Taysir Hayb. He is now serving eight years in prison for manslaughter - a sentence four times longer, a caption informed us at the end, than any soldier before received for shooting an unarmed civilian in the occupied territories. The film leaves it to us to decide whether Hayb was so (comparatively) harshly punished because he is a Beduin-Israeli, because Tom was British, or because Anthony and Jocelyn made such a fuss. We have also to decide whether the sentence vindicates Israel's claims to being a democracy operating under the rule of law.

The film was a tough watch, denying us many of the expected satisfactions of drama. In the Hollywood version, Anthony's attempts at rapprochement with Jocelyn would have resulted in a wedding as well as a funeral. Tom would have had a girlfriend. The British diplomats would have been craven. Instead we were able to appreciate the satisfactions of good journalism. The film began in chaos - the only clear thing being the repeated spelling out of Tom's surname - but ended in a coherent account of how young Hayb did not intend to kill children, but did wish to teach the protesters a lesson and thought his bosses would thank him for it.

Next to it, the new drama in ITV1's better-than-you'd-expect Monday-night thriller slot looked trivial. But most things would. Wired was set way back (say three weeks ago) when there were huge profits to be made in investment banking and featured Jodie Whittaker as Louise, the bankworker blackmailed into taking part in a massive fraud organised, unlikely as this seemed, by the languid Laurence Fox.

Whittaker and Fox were joined by the equally watchable Toby Stephens who played a slightly maverick cop camply dressed in a wetlook leather blouson. Louise told him: “You're not a trader, too plummy, not an investment banker, too interesting, not a stockbroker: I have never seen one wearing a single-cuff shirt with only one button.” I shall try to keep this formula in my head for people-watching purposes during what I assume will be many future visits to the Jobcentre.

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