Are you worried that knife crime is increasing in Britain? Many newspapers make you think that it has risen dramatically, but Channel 4 recently reported that murders in England and Wales involving knives have actually dropped from 243 in 1995 to 212 in 2005-6. This is obviously still too many, and other statistics show that victims and offenders are younger than they used to be - and many schoolchildren now carry knives, although most of them claim it is for self-defence.

Channel 4 tackled the subject this week in its Disarming Britain season - using drama as well as documentaries. The channel set up a Street Weapons Commission which visited five British cities to hear witnesses' views on the problem. The commission was headed by the rather forbidding Cherie Booth, wife of the former prime minister whose ten-year regime left most people feeling less secure.

The interviewees offered a wide range of opinions. For example, why does the government seem to be running down the probation service when probation officers have helped many offenders to reform? Are modern role models (for example celebrities) setting youngsters a bad example? Are black people alienated by the police's indiscriminate use of 'stop and search'? Since Mrs Thatcher pronounced that "there is no such thing as Society", have we degenerated into a nation of selfish people who do just what they want, without any sense of community (unless they are in a gang)?

Perhaps our government could learn lessons from The Truth About Street Weapons, a Dispatches programme in which Dr Lasoye (pictured), an A & E consultant at London's King's College Hospital, searched for solutions to the knife and gun injuries he frequently deals with. He welcomed the idea that street crime is a disease and, as with any issue of public health, we should treat its causes rather than its symptoms. However, the voluntary organisations trying to treat the causes are underfunded by government, which is spending billions on the opposite of disarming Britain.

The Channel 4 series left many questions unanswered - and so did the drama, Fallout (Channel 4), adapted by Roy Williams from his stage play. It depicted the unprovoked murder of a bright black teenager by a small gang of black youths, and the police investigation that followed. It may have given the impression that London is full of threatening black teenagers who use violence and are nasty towards women. It also suggested that the only way to solve such crimes is to bring in a black police officer who is prepared to rough up the suspects.

The street argot was sometimes hard to decipher but the whole thing looked authentic. There were powerful performances from Lennie James as Joe, the black officer, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Shanice, the girl apparently fancied by most of the gang.

The mother of the stabbed boy in Fallout said: "I don't know what is going on with the children." How TV Changed Britain (Channel 4) suggested that parents said the same thing back in the 1960s, when young mods and rockers were fighting in public, and in the seventies when punk arrived, and in the eighties and nineties when programmes like The Tube and The Word showed some unpleasant aspects of teen culture.

This documentary traced the history of TV for teenagers. The commentary noted that "TV has relentlessly pursued a young audience, with little idea of what they really want". Sanitised music shows like Top of the Pops (which started in 1964) could be watched by the whole family. Things changed in 1978 with Grange Hill portraying "a bog-standard comprehensive school" with problems of bullying, drugs and unruly kids.

The Word's 'Hopefuls' sequence featured "people who said they'd do anything to get on television" - a sad foretaste of subsequent shows encouraging laddish (and ladettish) behaviour, like Ibiza Uncovered and Big Brother. The documentary concluded: "With the internet fragmenting audiences, is it the end of youth TV?" Perhaps we can hope so.