White Girl, BBC2<br/>10 Days to War, BBC2

Cor blimey guv, give us better drama than this: The BBC's White season was full of too many programmes about the white working class and not enough by them

BBC2's white working-class season: how'd that bleedin' go then? Not so bad, guv, if you discount the reinforcing of certain, shall we say, unfortunate stereotypes, which got on my wick (Can we drop the mockney? No, this column has a commitment to socially inclusive ventriloquism) and also the way the folk what commissioned the season kept banging on about how effing brave they were to be putting these pieces of eight (that's not even the right rhyming slang – you've really got to stop) in front of me meat pies and Gordon Bennett if it ain't Mrs Howsyerfather having a tinkle on the old Joanna... (Opening paragraph has exploded in a shower of cliché, sorry.)

Our class system is based as much on pride as prejudice, but in the White season of programmes about white working classes, there was plenty of the latter.

There was an elegiac documentary about the Wibsey working men's club made by Paul Singer, an American whose tone resembled a nervous anthropologist meeting a baffling and endangered tribe he presumed dangerous. Sometimes you could see why he thought this. One interviewee recalled how, once upon a time, if a 16-year-old made trouble, "you could go out and give 'em a right doing, or give 'em a thick ear and tell their parents and they'd give 'em another thick ear". Then, regretfully: "But that's all gone." No one articulate was engaged to speak up for the resilient and robust qualities of the tribe: Tim Lott got it just right when he wrote in this paper last week that what the White season conspicuously lacked was a polemic in their defence. Programmes "by" would have been so much better than programmes "about".

Instead the drama centrepiece, writer Abi Morgan's White Girl, was a litany of the perceived sins of the working class, like an episode of Shameless without the redeeming humour. The cast was excellent – Anna Maxwell Martin managed to bring out a likeable quality in her boozy, shouty character while Holly Kenny dazzled as Leah (or, when in trouble, Leah-Ann Kylie McNeil), her miserable daughter – but the writing felt forced. The family was textbook feckless: the father sent his kids off dealing drugs on their tricycles, while the mother never fed the kids breakfast. Help came in the form of Islam, which the daughter turned to, finding secret succour in prayer and practical refuge with the saintly, breakfast-observing, next-door Muslim family.

An inspiring story, but one that was undermined by the documentaries that made up the White season, which suggested that, in reality, cultural exchange is much more fraught. The season unleashed a lot of vituperation – "I don't want to know about their culture and they don't want to know about mine", etc – that would never usually have received airtime. Inviting this self-expression is either healthy or unhealthy, depending on your point of view. But at least this season forced you to decide.

It was TV at its most socially engaging. It also showed some wonderful, heart-melting examples of multicultural successes, though none of them could ever be mistaken for agitprop, as Abi Morgan's drama could. Instead, they tended to take more eccentric forms, such as the sweet carer/girlfriend relationship between Monty, who survived Auschwitz, and Betty, who immigrated from Zaire (Storyville's All White in Barking) or the saintly patience of the headmaster of a school in Handsworth who has 70 per cent of his pupils speaking English as a second language, yet manages to make his school more of a Utopia than a Babel, and also teaches French.

10 Days to War, a series of plays by Ronan Bennett, is the dramatic equivalent of astronauts' grub: each distilled to 10 minutes, they keep you going, ideas-wise, for 24 hours. Sometimes crude (government hawks tend to malevolent caricature and "Clare Short" had mislaid her Black Country accent), they are still infinitely preferable to Channel 4's embarrassing Happy Birthday Iraq trailers. The battlefield is no place for irony.