Oxford appeared in two different guises on Sunday's TV. Our caring side was illustrated in Our Big Fair Trade Adventure (Channel 4), which followed three pupils from Cheney School on a trip to India to get a school shirt manufactured the Fair Trade way. Martha, Diko and Robin were angry at the high profits made by clothing companies which get their goods from workers in the Third World. The three children met exploited workers in Indian cotton fields and garment factories, many of which use child labour.

Eventually the schoolchildren found two factories which could supply the T-shirts, although the children were remarkably fussy about the design they wanted. They even plumped for the factory that was less Fair Trade than the other, although the two girls changed their minds when they returned home. It was an educative programme, showing not only how we benefit from cheap labour elsewhere but also how easy it is to forget Fair Trade principles when you are guided more by fashion than by ethical considerations.

A less appealing aspect of Oxford was on show in Blue Blood (BBC2), a Storyville documentary about the annual boxing contest between Oxford and Cambridge Universities. There were lots of pretty pictures of our city, plus some ugly ones of young men trying to inflict damage on one another, with plentiful shots of bleeding noses. Some of the contestants justified taking on such a challenge, as it involves considerable training and application, but basically most of them seemed to be involved so that they could call themselves Oxford blues. And Fred, a biochemistry student, was brutally frank about his motives, saying "I like hitting things . . . You go in there to smash each other up. It's brutal, it's stupid, it's just an ignoramus sport - that's what I do."

At least these two documentaries were more worthwhile than Sunday's other big offering: the first episode of The Last Enemy (BBC1). This is one of those "What the hell is going on?" dramas - a series set in future Britain where surveillance is getting increasingly pervasive. It might have made a good point about our over-scrutinised society but the plot was not only implausible but incomprehensible. A researcher returns from China for his brother's funeral and finds himself deep in a morass of improbable situations. Robert Carlyle prowls about, exuding menace without uttering a single word, and there's a mysterious woman called Nadir. This series promises to be the nadir of futuristic drama.

While on the subject of implausibility, television is so crammed with so-called 'reality TV' that we get ever fewer opportunities to see genuine reality. Film-maker Sue Bourne realised that she knew very little about the residents of the London street she had lived in for 14 years, and started calling on some of them.

Among those she met for My Street (Channel 4) were Adam, a man suffering from Tourette's syndrome (who died before she finished filming), and Alec, a 91-year-old who came here from Poland in 1948 and has lived in the same house ever since - but knows nobody else in the street. Sue found that there is real neighbourliness among some of the residents, although it was not easy to feel neighbourly towards the household crammed with a large number of continually partying New Zealanders. This documentary served as an eye-opening insight into everyday lives.

If some Oxford schoolchildren could reveal the unfairness of the fashion trade, can't we overcome our ludicrous obsession with bottled water? Panorama (BBC1) showed how British tap-water is probably just as good for you, and the plastic bottles in which water is sold add to pollution and landfill. There are also the costly effects of transporting the water from as far away as Fiji, where a third of the population has no access to clean water, and typhoid is a serious threat. The widespread and unnecessary use of bottled water in this country may be depriving the Third World of the water it needs.