Born Equal (BBC1); Toulouse-Lautrec: The Full Story (C4): Tis the season to be jolly - unless you happen to be a BBC scheduler determined to be Scrooge-like and put a damper on the Christmas party spirit.

Born Equal was as unrelentingly grim a drama as you're likely to see, one that spent 85 minutes hitting the viewer over the head with social issues. It was also, despite a cast led by Colin Firth and Robert Carlyle, incredibly boring. Watching people suffer only passes as entertainment if we care about them and with this lot, frankly, my dears, I couldn't give a damn.

Director Dominic Savage is known for his hard-hitting dramas focussing on important social matters. Here, the lives of a group of people - some rich, some poor, all suffering - collided through a homeless hostel, or "house of happiness" as someone with a dark sense of humour called it.

While Firth's city worker pondered the question, "What are you going to spend your mill on?" and his pregnant wife shopped for a new home, Anne-Marie Duff's heavily pregnant, abused woman was kipping with her daughter in a small, unwelcoming room in the hostel.

Outside, Carlyle's pent-up, mixed up chap with psychopathic tendencies roamed the streets looking for trouble and, unsurprisingly, ended up on Firth's doorstep. Although in a drama so slow-moving that I've seen tortoises move faster, it didn't come soon enough.

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Full Story was also a long slog, but at least the artist's rock'n'roll lifestyle of sex, drugs and booze was a lively one.

Presenter Waldemar Januszczak achieved a good balance between life and art. He wanted to get away from the image of Henry - as he insisted on calling him - as the drunken dwarf from the Moulin Rouge. "It's so unfair," he insisted.

He saw him as one of the most courageous and progressive artists there's been. That he was short, drank and lived in a brothel was "just an itsy bitsy bit of his story".

He was the son of first cousins, themselves the children of first cousins, which was "genetically disastrous". Henry was always ill and, after breaking his legs as a child, stopped growing. At least, his legs did. "Other bits of him were not that short," said Januszczak, going on to chronicle his encounters with woman. Not for nothing did they nickname Henry the coffee pot - "because he was small and had a big spout".

Painting was all he was ever good at, so, armed with a brush and an allowance, he went to Paris where he succumbed to temptation in the "naughty quarter" of Montmartre.

Not only did Januszczak amply describe Henry's life and loves, but conveyed his enthusiasm for the artist's paintings and posters. Seeing them, you realise just how familiar they are and that you see them all the time.