Last Night's Television: Waterloo Road, BBC1<br />It's not Easy Being Green, BBC2

Not quite a class act

I'd love to read an Ofsted report on Waterloo Road, the school at the centre of BBC1's educational soap, which began its fourth series last night. It would certainly make more entertaining reading than the usual bureacratic spiel about "nurturing learning environments" and "weaknesses to be addressed". In fact, it would read like an unusually juicy edition of a Sunday tabloid. Consider the recent history. The headmistress has just been revealed to have spent time in the past working as a prostitute, a fact she squared up to in front of the entire school at the end of the last series. Shortly after that, several of the school buildings went up in smoke, trapping said headmistress under blazing rubble and hospitalising her with serious burns. Hardly surprising, really, that the onset of a new term should be giving her stress dreams, one of which kicked off last night's episode. Dressed only in her underwear, Mrs Mason staggered woozily into assembly to find both pupils and teachers viciously chanting for her dismissal.

Naturally, that wasn't what actually happened. Mrs Mason is playing the Sidney Poitier role here – no child left behind, they're not bad, they're just angry or frightened – so instead she got a close-harmony version of "Welcome Home" and a standing ovation. There was the odd curled lip, from members of staff who hadn't entirely bought into the New Gentleness, but by and large she could hardly have hoped for a better start to the term. Yes, there was something a little ominous about the way she said "I'm fine" when colleagues questioned the speed of her return to work, and she flinched like a soldier with shellshock at the bustle of the corridors, but it looked as if the worst of the melodrama was over.

She lives, of course, in blissful ignorance of the fact that she is the mere plaything of a vengeful creator with a fierce aversion to dull routine. So, before the day was out, the playground was filled with panicking pupils, and police cars with flashing blue lights were screeching through the school gates. This was thanks to the Kelly family, who tipped up from their latest eviction, bin-liners in hand, and demanded to be enrolled as new pupils. Earl Kelly was the problem, a furious ball of aggression who introduced himself to at least one teacher by hurling him against the lockers and then miming a head-shot execution with his fingers. "Now I'm going to pretend that you didn't just do that, because it's your first day," replied the teacher, showing a rather startling degree of latitude. Perhaps the whole place would grind to a halt if they made a big to-do out of every little death threat.

Unfortunately, Earl had a real gun too, and when news reached Mrs Mason, she was obliged to evacuate the school and call in the police. Rather oddly, the pupils were herded into a large throng in the playground – where they would make a virtually unmissable target for a rampage shooter – and the police then allowed Mrs Mason to storm the building personally and track down Earl's younger brother, who'd been persuaded to take the rap. There was also a ludicrously contrived bit of business with a pupil who had obligingly stained his white T-shirt with blood after cutting his hand and so could stagger from the building giving everyone the impression that he'd just been shot. Curiously, the police appeared to think that the best place for the pupils as the marksmen closed in was tightly packed around the door from which the gunman was most likely to emerge. It's soap, in other words, and it's a pity, because the subject matter surely deserves something tougher and more direct. If it's for children, then you wonder why they cancelled Grange Hill. If it's for grown-ups, then it needs to be a good deal less sanitised and cleaned-up than it actually is.

It's Not Easy Being Green has returned as a magazine programme with Dick Strawbridge – a kind of human Trumpton character – required to apply his trademark joviality to celebrity guests (Phil Tufnell this week) and Lauren Laverne exploring the luxury end of ecological rectitude. There's now a regular feature on the green refit of a standard Victorian terrace and joky little filmlets giving eco tips. Last night, it was a spoof deodorant commercial touting the benefits of bauxite crystal. It might equally be called "It's Bloody Expensive Being Green": Dick's photo-voltaic array cost him £15,000 to install, the earth-friendly sheep's-wool insulation adopted for the Victorian terrace cost four times as much as the ordinary kind and the natural swimming pool that Lauren reported on cost a cool £100,000. I quite enjoyed it, but I couldn't help wondering whether the amount of power consumed by the audience in watching it would even come close to being offset by the economies in energy use it persuades them to make.