In a week of lamentations, we had three deaths, three final curtain calls through the invisible fourth wall among those who put on the motley. The rude mechanicals must now cast aside Thalia’s smiling mask to wear Melpomene’s tragic visage. Anthony Minghella, whose shocking exit came just as his last film was about to be shown; Paul Scofield, a truly heroic actor. I watched the six o’clock news as the caster, some Autocue plug-in with a muted accent from semidetached nowhere, arranged his face into that bland gravitas they keep for the latterly famous and freshly demised. He said: “Today, a great and dearly loved actor passed away, best known for his portrayal of one of the old gits in Last of the Summer Wine, and the prison officer who wasn’t the main one in Porridge. Brian Wilde will be greatly missed.” Then we saw a couple of unfunny clips and a hasty interview with a cardiganed denizen of decrepit sitcoms, and it was back to the studio, where the Noddy rote-reader added his own little “Sadly missed”, and looked up at the Autocue with a flicker of panic.

Oh no, there was another dead actor. What were the chances he had peaked too early, already using up his famous-deceased face? So, he quickly slipped into the one reserved for announcing small tornadoes in Cornwall and said: “Another actor died today: Paul Scofield, best known as that religious bloke in A Man for All Weathers.” There was a blurred photograph of Scofield from behind, as Lear, and it was back to weather or sport or an alsatian that was living in sin with a duckling. This happened on both ITV and the BBC early-evening news.

I don’t often bellow at the television. I don’t have to. I can do this instead. But I went properly radio rental – the complete Basil Fawlty, all on my own in the living room, screaming at the inoffensive, lick-spittle, Andrex-puppy newsmonger and the smiley, culturally relative, accessible, nonjudgmental, multi-cultural, mouthwashed, soulless, fearful Tristrams who, in the final billing of death, had placed the man with two supporting parts in defunct comedies before one of the truly great postwar British actors.

This was not Wilde’s fault, but not even his agent would claim he was a panoramic, life-changing talent. I know that, as both approached the pearly gates, Brian would have said: “After you, old man.”

What made me, and still makes me, angry is that this cultural faux pas wasn’t made on some kids’ magazine programme or a funky satellite celebrity round-up - it was the six o’clock news. The biggest job in all news is setting the running order, deciding what is and isn’t important enough to be broadcast. News is the one part of public broadcasting that can’t be dictated by public opinion, but only by public service - not what we want to know, but what we should and need to know. And I know exactly why some smiley, young, pulsating gumboil of a know-nothing, sneery, cynical, bearded relativist thought a minor sitcom actor was more important than Paul Scofield. He thought it was a small, sniggering blow against elitism, hardback culture, the Establishment and snobbery - and probably fox-hunting, global warming and the invasion of Tibet. I’ve never called for anyone to be fired in this column, but this little prat should be. Not just fired - he should be handed over, naked and sobbing, to the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Yorick. I still don’t feel any better.

Minghella’s last production was, on the face of it, an odd choice for the man who directed The English Patient and operas. The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency(Sunday, BBC1) was adapted for television by Richard Curtis, and financed and facilitated in part by the Botswana government as a tourist commercial. I should admit to not having read any of Alexander McCall Smith’s books, but I watched this with a couple of women who had, and I understand that to read them is to love them, and that almost everybody has.

Botswana is the flattest country on earth. It was a protectorate, never a colony, and it is one of my favourite places. It did look ravishing. How nice to have an African programme actually shot in the country it says it is and not a bit of southern Spain. Within 10 minutes, I was getting a not entirely euphoric Herriot recall. Curtis and Minghella have, between them, attempted to do the hardest thing in television drama. It’s what they call charm and you and I know as whimsy. If you can get the audience to swallow whimsy without regurgitating, they will curl up in your palm every Sunday for as long as you can be bothered to spoon it to them. I was less convinced by it all than the people who watched it with me, who kept telling me how true to the feelings of the book it was. I found the laid-back pace somnambulant. I did like the way it showed Africa as a parochial, funny and magical place, however. Those who say this portrait is patronising and naive and lacks grit never seem to complain about the bogus romanticism of Coronation Street or EastEnders or anything with Martin Clunes in it. Africa deserves this bright alternative after decades of charity appeals. Whether the main character and her softly comic accomplices, solving simple, unexciting crimes with parable denouement, can win Sunday-evening hearts, who can tell? Yet I can’t think of a good reason why they shouldn’t.

He Kills Coppers (Sunday, ITV1) was an adaptation of Jake Arnott’s book, which, in turn, was a factionalisation of the murders of three policemen in London, taking us through the now overfamiliar television territory of Soho in the 1960s, when organised crime was run by cuddly Maltese and not Albanians or Russians. Innocent times - when murder victims were placed neatly in left-luggage offices, human trafficking meant a couple of fat girls down from Wigan and drugs were nicked out of your mum’s handbag. This production nearly drowns in its period detail and the terrible self-conscious smoking everyone takes part in, as if it were public oral sex. Fags are this year’s dramatic tic to provide 20th-century atmosphere. The best thing about it - apart from Maureen Lipman, always a pleasure - was that Rafe Spall has finally found a role that properly utilises his undoubted, though narrow, talent as a particular weak sort of unsympathetic bully. His recent roles in costume drama have all been casting directors’ wishful thinking. He has an undoubtable, watchable power, but it only goes this far. The sooner he gets himself typecast, the better.

Gossip Girl(Thursday, ITV2) is a meritless exploitation of puritan press intrusion and internet scandal-mongering into the lives of meritless people, following the vapid snobberies and prim sexual peccadilloes of the young and rich with shiny hair. American drama, as I noted last week, is captivated by salivating, envious window-shopping for the fantasy lives of rich people. These programmes are more of a sign of imminent financial depression than anything on Bloomberg. This particular nose pressed against the window of wealth porn was immoral, ugly and dispiriting. If you think The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is an unlikely view of Africa, it’s nothing to the fairy-tale propaganda of this Dante-esque vision of New York.

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