Silent Witness BBC1
Tribe BBC2
Blood on the Carpet BBC2
Love In A Cold Climate BBC1

Teenagers, eh? In Silent Witness, two dead girls were discovered in a Norwegian ski resort and defrosted by Amanda Burton's chilly pathologist, Sam Ryan, to reveal the kind of tangled emotional plots that, had they managed to stay alive long enough, they would probably have left behind by their twenties.

One of the dead girls, Ruth, was a virgin while the other, Louise, had been pregnant with twins. It turned out that one of the twins had been fathered by her uncle (Anthony Head, so sinister he couldn't possibly be the murderer) and the other by a nice, earnest young man who worked for a travel company (obviously guilty). So they weren't really twins at all. I must lead a very sheltered life, but the possibility of this kind of genetic pick'n'mix came as a revelation. Then Anthony Head turned out not to be Louise's uncle, but her father, so one of her unborn children would have been... what, precisely? Her own sister, as well as her daughter? This was a complex set of circumstances even by teenage standards. And then it got worse, as the real murderer turned out to be neither of the prime suspects, but an employee of her father's - or at least the man we had assumed to be her father - who was keen to put Louise and the other girls preyed upon by the amoral Anthony Head out of their perceived misery. He may have had a point.

One could tell that Professor Ryan had got a bit too involved in this case because, very occasionally, she'd reach out to make physical contact with the living, though always with considerably less relish than she showed for the dead. There are signs, however, that like last week's corpses, brittle Sam might be thawing - though we may not like what is revealed when she does. Still, in a bold leap forward for her character, Burton didn't once have to sit in a car in the rain, biting her lip pensively while contemplating the navels, spleens, livers and brains of murder victims. On the wall of her office there is even a recently installed pinboard decorated with postcards and snapshots - all heartwarming signs of life, if not yet quite a life. Hormonal chaos was explored in equally exhausting, occasionally baffling, depth by BBC2's Tribe, a nightly series of short films revealing the dark underbelly of teenagers, though it is entirely possible that in several cases there wasn't anything other than a dark underbelly. I was very worried about Laura, star of the first film, Don't Sleep With Any DJs whose fetishistic attachment to the garage music scene in general ('garage is my whole life') and the Heartless Crew (Mighty Mo, Fonty, Bushkin) in particular, was matched only by her lack of even the most basic self-awareness, marking her out as a young woman of apparently infinite stupidity.

Laura had a job working in a club promotions company, which, somewhat dangerously, further fuelled her fantasy half-life. Laura's young female boss, Sinem, talked about trying to get her 'to apply her enthusiasm for the industry' and 'hopefully, in time, Laura will be a Mini-Me'. There seemed little chance of this. Developmentally arrested, like an overgrown toddler blunderingly testing the boundaries of her world, Laura appeared to lack whatever genetic mechanism it is that allows even a teenager to stand back and say 'hang on, maybe I'm screwing things up?'

Sinem tried to persuade Laura that she shouldn't say 'd'ya know wot I mean?' quite so often, and that she shouldn't talk about 'raving', but use 'clubbing' instead. Laura wouldn't listen, and even argued like it mattered. It was compulsively funny-grotesque to watch, but it hurt too. Laura also argued with her friends. All of them. Prattling at the camera while showing off her Sam Ryan-style pinboard, replete with trophy mugshots, it became clear that Laura had had a lot of friends, but that none of them had lasted. Currently best friends with Sunshine ('I couldn't rave Cream of The Crop without her'), this was a relationship based, in Laura's case, on expediency and, in Sunshine's, probably on laziness ('I think we attached to each other. Like, "you'll compensate for my loss of Vicky, I'll compensate for your loss of Caroline_ ",' explained Sunshine shortly before she stopped returning Laura's calls). Either way, by the end of the film, Laura had a new best friend, Ellie, with whom she could 'rave Cream of the Crop' for a few more weeks at least.

But First Prize in the Self-Delusion Championships had to go to Lola Marie, star of Tuesday's film You Look Like A Proper Presenter . I would have loved to find out how Lola had ever imagined she'd make a TV presenter, but because each film took their subjects as they found them we were denied any background. 'I'm enunciaytin. Enun-see-aytin!' Lola kept explaining to her sweetly supportive (though baffled) boyfriend, as she forced him to watch her paid-for, semi-professional 'showreel' - shots of her accosting shoppers for perky little vox-pops, or standing in a Magnet Kitchens showroom saying 'the Corian worktop works perfect for those accidental spills!' Lola then sent her tape to the producers of Changing Rooms and, as a piece of comparative advertising, it worked brilliantly. Thanks to Lola I now recognise just how talented Carol Smillie really is.

Individually, all the films were illuminating, sometimes funny, occasionally touching, but viewed collectively Tribe was like being suffocated in a dumpster full of teenager's diaries. And you know you're hopelessly out of touch with the yoof of today, in all their raging, raving, hurtling hopelessness, when the only people who seemed to talk any sense at all were their parents. Even the ones who didn't speak English.

But just when I had decided that teenagers have the monopoly on rampant idiocy, along came a cracking edition of Blood on the Carpet to prove that wisdom need not necessarily be the preserve of the physically mature. Conceived by Michael Lang, the man responsible for the first great festival, Woodstock 1999, sounded like a bad idea from the start, particularly given that Peace and Love is not exactly the youthful credo of our times. Wanting to recreate 'the most sacred hippy event of all time' (though, it was, arguably, only the most sacred hippy event of the latter half of one decade in the 20th century), Lang hired a disused airforce base near Rome, upstate New York, booked unlovely headline bands like Insane Clown Posse and Limp Bizkit, and recruited some of his old hippy mates.

Lisa Law had run the original (free) Woodstock soup kitchen, while Wavy Gravy had enforced 1969's 'security' wearing a bear costume and wielding a rubber shovel, but was now mostly famous for having been immortalised, like Jerry Garcia, as an unpleasantly savoury-sounding Ben and Jerry's ice-cream flavour (beef jerky and chocolate chip hippy, or what?). Sadly, by day three of the festival, it was all going very wrong vibewise, so Wavy took to the stage.

'I thought I could kind of sneak the crowd into "Om-ing"... One voice, one sound, have them build it and build it and build it and then send it out for peace on the planet... '

'He tried to sage the crowd,' Lisa added, 'but it didn't really work... '

Sage? Sorry, did I heard that correctly?

'Yeah, light up some sage!' explained Gravy, 'so I'm saging away_ and I'm thinking, is that a swastika on that skinhead?'

'But,' said Lisa, 'the kids are like "who's that?" ' They didn't understand him... ' 'Then the crowd were shouting "fuck Jerry!" - Jerry Garcia! - so I'm off!'

Then, while I was weeping with mild hysteria, it was revealed that the crowd were in fact shouting "Buck Cherry", which was the name of the next band. By the time the organisers had handed out the candles for the Jimi Hendrix tribute, the kids were sick of being charged '4 bucks for water, 6 for soda, 8 for a burger and 12 for a little pizza' so they decided Rome might as well burn instead. Right on kids! I can't remember the last time I have laughed so much in front of the box.

Mind you, I'd laughed quite a lot at Alan Bates's Uncle Matthew and Sheila Gish's Lady Montdore in Love In A Cold Climate and would have liked to laugh a bit more, but two books had been squished into less than three hours viewing so that this adaptation seemed even more scared of commitment than the Bolter. Whizzing through characters and plotlets it left viewers barely enough time to kick off their mules, light a cocktail sobranie, recline on the chaise with a snifter and notice that, aside from swearing and pierced belly-buttons, when it comes to the messy emotional landscape of teenage girls, not so very much has changed since Mitford's day.