If you have two grains of rice there must be only so much envying you can summon up for someone who has four grains.

It may be twice what you have, but it still wouldn’t fill your belly. That may be why the most subversive tool in Pyongyang today is smuggled videos of South Korean soap operas. “Until we watched South Korean films,” says a North Korean who has fled to China with her son, “we thought there were many beggars in the outside world. But in reality, we are the beggars.” Can you imagine how gloomy life must be if you gaze at South Korea’s equivalents of EastEnders and Coronation Street and you actually swoon with jealousy? Kim Jung Eun’s investigation into the world of North Korean dissidents in Dispatches: Undercover in the Secret State (Channel 4) was a numbing peep into the repression of the world’s last Stalinist regime; a country where the sort of mild, water-cooler-conversation level of dissent that we take for granted is met with summary executions, pour decourager les autres; and where the worry that gives the rulers the most sleepless nights is the danger that their citizens might be secretly sneaking glimpses of Seoul’s equivalent of Dot Cotton.

We saw secretly filmed footage — taken by dissidents videoing at the risk of their own lives — of random public executions; of people lying dead in the street, while others just walked past because that is not an uncommon sight; of children stealing to get some food; of elderly women rail passengers being beaten by ticket collectors because they lack the permit that is needed to travel from one town to another; of adults and children feverishly scrambling under stopping trains, like prospectors in a gold rush, to collect excrement they can sell.

Kim Jung Eun tracks down North Korean defectors in Seoul and Bangkok and China, men and women whose lives are still at risk because North Korea ruthlessly tracks down dissidents who have fled: just as Kim Jong Il can’t afford news from the outside world to seep in to North Korea and rot the foundations of his dictatorship, nor can he afford news from within North Korea to seep out and alert the world that his regime is far more repressive than anyone dared imagine.

Looking back now on the heyday of communism you wonder why politicians and academics even bothered writing those long tomes explaining and justifying communism, when all you needed to do to get a fix on communism was to ask how many people wanted to emigrate to a communist state, and how many wanted to emigrate from one. That’s really all you need to know, isn’t it? Of course, just inquiring discreetly about the possibility of leaving North Korea is enough to get you shoved in front a firing squad. Those lucky enough to be spared a bullet find themselves, instead, in the company of the other 200,000 political prisoners in North Korea.

Kim Jong Il’s increasingly desperate attempts to murder, terrify and silence his subjects into believing they are all having the time of their lives reminds you of what Krushchev realised long ago; that “if, after 40 years of communism, a person cannot have a glass of milk or a pair of shoes, he will not believe that communism is a good thing, no matter what you tell him”.

Like Kim Jung Eun’s Dispatches film, Norma Percy’s Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace (BBC Two) has that key ingredient that makes documentaries glisten like jewels: access. Through interviews with many of the most influential figures in this continuing drama, the second episode in Percy’s riveting series addressed itself to Yassir Arafat.

It explored the Palestinian leader’s failure to control Hamas, whose leaders re-counted the glee with which they send young suicide bombers to their deaths and the jubilation with which they greet news of the carnage inflicted; also Arafat’s refusal to accept any of the deals offered to him by peace-brokers, to the point where even his last champion in Washington, Colin Powell, threw up his hands in despair and gave up. The question that hung in the air — without anything so crude as a definitive answer — was: could peace between Israelis and Palestinians have been struck by now (or, at least, major progress been made) if Arafat had not been such a key player in the proceedings for so long?

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