Eyewitnesses to terror.

Who could take seriously a programme called Liz Hurley's Brains? C4 supplied only a ten-minute preview of a documentary aiming to demonstrate that Liz's most valuable asset is not her much-photographed body but the steely determination lurking inside her mind.

The notion that this army man's daughter "used her head to mould herself into an icon of the 21st century" was undermined by showing her disrobing several times in movie clips.

Harry At 18 did much the same thing, stating that Prince Harry is "in many ways a very ordinary 18-year-old" and then proving otherwise by showing him doing things that only the third in line to the throne can do.

As well as much-publicised brushes with drink and drugs, Harry has an eye for blondes. His appreciation of the opposite sex began early - at 11 he sent a Valentine card to model Cindy Crawford. Nowadays his chat-up line goes something like, "would you like to come back to my palace for a drink?"

While C4 and C5 were being gossipy, BBC1 devoted two hours to 9/11, a remarkable documentary marking the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Some might say the images are still fresh enough in the mind without the need to replay them over and over again, especially as this covered much of the same ground as C5's A Firefighters' Story. Both began as documentaries about New York firefighters and ended up as eyewitness accounts of world-shattering events.

French film-makers Jules and Gedeon Naudet spent several months following probationary fireman Tony, assigned to one of the oldest firehouses in the city. They had plenty of footage of firefighters eating, but no fire stories.

That changed on September 11 as the brothers became separated in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attack. Jules found himself inside one of the towers, as fire commanders set up a command post and tried to cope with a situation they couldn't fully comprehend.

There's the constant sound of people hitting the ground. "How bad is it up there that the better option is to jump?," asks one firefighter. At one point, an elevator opens and out walks a crowd of people trapped inside since the aircraft struck the building and unaware of what's been happening.

As the tower collapsed, Jules's camera captured the tremendous noise, falling rubble and clouds of dust as he ran for his life. Meanwhile, Gedeon wandered the streets, desperately searching for a brother he feared was dead.

It was the personal stories gave the film its power, from the fire chief who saved Jules but whose firefighter brother died, to probationer Tony who went missing for hours.

Then came the hopelessness of the rescue operation. "The building collapsed to dust, how are we supposed to find anybody when there's nothing left of the building?" asks one searcher.