The secret millionaire Channel 4, 9pm fiddles, cheats and scams ITV1, 9pm I am indebted to reader Jim Roy for spotting a memorable instance of pithy Glasgow wisdom in last week's Secret Millionaire. The millionaire in question, Alton Towers owner Nick Leslau, visited the no-nonsense Possilpark in the north of Glasgow, befriending a local blind man. Jim was impressed by the man's reply to Leslau's question as to why lots of his friends had abandoned him after he lost his sight: "Because they're aw ignorant basturrts."

The secret millionaire
Channel 4, 9pm
fiddles, cheats and scams
ITV1, 9pm
I am indebted to reader Jim Roy for spotting a memorable instance of pithy Glasgow wisdom in last week's Secret Millionaire. The millionaire in question, Alton Towers owner Nick Leslau, visited the no-nonsense Possilpark in the north of Glasgow, befriending a local blind man. Jim was impressed by the man's reply to Leslau's question as to why lots of his friends had abandoned him after he lost his sight: "Because they're aw ignorant basturrts."

No statement of such pungency emerged during this week's episode, which deposited a chatty and charismatic millionaire marketing man, Carl Hopkins, on the run-down streets of Easington, a deprived former mining village in County Durham.

Hopkins had spent his boyhood on a nondescript council housing scheme in Leeds, vowing at an early age to leave it for a Technicolor life elsewhere. Mission accomplished, he found himself living in isolated rural splendour.

In his 10 days spent walking round Easington as a community warden, Hopkins marvelled at getting to know more folk than he had in a decade behind the closed front-gates of his sumptuous abode. He also recalled how he'd spent years as a kid waiting for something to come round the corner of his lowly street and help him to self-improvement - and nothing ever did.

Palpably humbled by the efforts of everyday folk, Hopkins thus wrote five-figure cheques to Easington Colliery Band and Easington Miners' Welfare Centre, before handing £13,000 to the city farm and animal centre run by ex-miner Jim, largely at his own expense.

Jim had succeeded in saving some of Easington's bored and aimless teenage youth from their own worst tendencies by teaching them animal husbandry and how to grow their own veg on allotments. When Hopkins handed him the cheque that would keep his good work going for at least the next two years, Jim's relief and joy prompted an unforgettable Geordie exclamation: "It's laik gettin' a pair o' wings!"

In contrast, Secret Millionaires has an increasingly leaden-footed feel to its format. How about a new spin-off: call it Clandestine Council Investors, say, or Undercover Government Funders? Cameras will then follow masked, gagged politicians as they post their expenses cheques through deserving constituents' letterboxes by night.

Fiddles, Cheats and Scams is a busy, meticulously assembled new three-part series which didn't short-change the viewer last night as it encouraged us all to cold-shoulder those who defraud insurance companies with bogus or inflated claims.

Such fraud costs £1.6bn a year, adding £40 to the cost of each of the multiple annual insurance policies - car, home, holiday - taken out by us non-cheats.

Presenter Morland Sanders deployed a battery of effective weapons to enlist us in his fight against fakers, not the least of them being pointed questioning which made Lord Brocket, jailed for a bogus £4.5m car theft claim, look rightly ashamed.

Elsewhere, forensic reconstruction proved that a pot of white paint can't magically circle the average living room and wreak widespread havoc on all its soft furnishings.

Best of all, there was undercover video film recorded by private eyes. And so the ends of justice were served by us seeing a tubby conman benefit from an instant miracle - suddenly forsaking his wheelchair in order to frolic on a beach in slow motion, as the programme played the unmistakable theme tune to Chariots of Fire.