TELEVISION / Hasta la vista, baby: Thomas Sutcliffe watches the final episode of Eldorado; plus One Foot in the Past

THERE must have been quite a few people who watched their first episode of Eldorado yesterday evening, perhaps even a handful (recently returned arctic explorers, recovered coma victims) who weren't aware that the programme was finally about to sink beneath the silky, computer-generated sea that figures in its titles. It would be nice to think that one of them excitedly turned to a friend and said 'Hey, this is really good] Will you video the next episode for me?'

All addictions start with the first hit, a fact that is rather truer of soaps than most drugs, so it isn't technically impossible that someone could be going through a mild form of cold turkey next week. The fact that the last episode was a cold turkey makes it unlikely, though. There were some good hooks; a villainous smoothy in a Miro shirt and migraine-inducing purple suit appeared to get himself blown up in his villainously smooth motor (presumably a punitive attack carried out by the Menswear Association of Spain).

Unfortunately he turned up again at the last minute to sail into the darkness with his Spanish girlfriend, who had believed until then that he was barbecue. Their reunion suggested that she was either a very poor actress playing a woman profoundly moved by this sudden shock or a very good actress playing a women determined to conceal her surprise at all costs.

There was a good moment, too, in the local police station when a women searching for her missing husband was asked whether she had 'checked the bitch'. Which one's the bitch, you wondered, perking up for a while, before you realised that the policeman was simply suggesting that hubby had fallen asleep on the sea-front. Most of the Spanish characters spoke surprisingly good English, in fact, including the detective who was chasing the villainous smoothy (it was a busy day for the police). 'H'all in good tahm, pliss,' he said to an anxious member of the public at one point, no doubt reflecting with satisfaction that his Berlitz 'Let's Talk Copper' course had been worth every peseta.

For devoted watchers I suppose the tying of knots had a certain appeal, though it wasn't exactly macrame you were looking at. A rather gloomy family occupied most of the airtime, revealing secrets of paternity, fleeing to the airport, pledging their love all round in a shameless piece of final-act tear-jerking and then fleeing back home again before the credits rolled. The woman who had lost her husband discovered that he was a bigamist and another couple (I'm sorry but I haven't a clue what they were called) finally clinched after a lot of mournful consolation.

The acting wasn't dreadful but nobody should be holding their breath when the Baftas come round and there was at least one nasty case of Myopia Dramatis, a condition (first identified by Victoria Wood in Acorn Antiques) which renders a character temporarily blind to the presence of somebody directly in their field of vision. The continuity was also a little wobbly here and there, but then I guess continuity was the last thing on their minds.

It won't be long, of course, before the Eldorado experience is sterilised by time, and becomes a delightful oddity of broadcasting history rather than a painful thorn in the evening schedules. Because of this English tendency to regard the national heritage as a territory for tea-towels and fond recollection, I approached One Foot in the Past, with its studiously larky title, a little warily. In fact, despite a jolly contribution from Lucinda Lambton on the architectural legacies of the philanthropist millionaire Andrew Carnegie and a slightly thin piece on the reconstruction of St George's Hall in Windsor Castle (essentially a pop-up version of the final chapters of Mark Girouard's book about the castle), the programme offered more than a chronological coach-trip.

Aminatta Forna's short film on the buried history of the British slave trade reminded you (like Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger) that much civic prosperity had been built on the Triangular Trade. British ships carried away at least three and a half million Africans, a tragedy memorialised only in the occasional street name (The Goree in Liverpool refers to an island off the coast of Senegal, used as a holding-station for slaves in transit, while Colston Avenue in Bristol commemorates one of the city's richest slave-traders). It would have been nice to press a little further in this inquiry (the Tate Gallery was built with sugar money, we know, but was it slave money too?), but it was refreshing anyway to be reminded that the past can bite.