Pride and Privilege BBC2, 9pm Imagine . . . BBC1, 10.35pm

Much occurred in the first hour-long instalment of Pride and Privilege, a series of fly-in-the-dorm progs capturing a year in the lives of pupils and staff at Glenalmond College, the fee-paying Perthshire boarding school.

So many bright and hopeful young things! So many shiny-eyed stories of educational aspiration! Too many, in fact, and for too long, too.

For its own televisual good, Pride and Privilege should have severely pruned its multiplicity of narrative threads (especially the hackneyed "Will he/won't he make the rugby first XV?" sporting one); cut back on its vast Glenalmond cast; and reduced its running time.

That way, you wouldn't have been left with the feeling that you were watching at least three documentaries at once - all serving to build a generic portrait of school life, rather than a picture specific to dear old Coll. For there must be something truly singular about the school which helped shape a dynasty of distinguished journalists (the Cockburns), along with comic deities including Miles Kington, Phil Kay and Robbie Coltrane, yes?

So with what unique Glenalmond revelations did Pride and Privilege actually leave us? Tweed jackets for its boys' uniform instead of school blazers, mibbes? Ankle-length skirts as daywear for the girls? There wasn't much else.

It was one of Glenalmond's young women, 15-year-old Tamsin, who gave Pride and Privilege its best moment. She seemed to be confirming negative class stereotype when confiding to the camera, in a well-brung-up purr, that "I want to marry somebody who is rich and I want an estate a few estates."

However, it later became evident that Tamsin is a bit of a joker: she'd actually been providing a satirical study in upper-crust vacuity. Ooh, flippin' kids: they're the most distinctive thing about any seat of learning.

Some of Venezuela's 270,000 distinctive young musicians illuminated the screen in Imagine ... as Alan Yentob ambled around Caracas, probing the remarkable success story which is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra.

Under the determined and politically adept leadership of Jose Antonio Abreu, the Venezuelan government has spent the past 33 years funding a socio-educational experiment in communal learning - El Sistema - that has created a nationwide family of classical musicians.

Currently, Venezuela funds a network of 15,000 teachers and 200 music schools, all geared towards training up young folk into 200-strong orchestras. The cost? $29m a year.

The scheme's prime example, the aforementioned Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra under the conductorship of Gustavo Dudamel, has wowed festivals in Edinburgh and Salzburg, plus the Proms at London's Royal Albert Hall. Dudamel and his players have secured top jobs around the world, while also retaining a laudable urge to continue to contribute to their home nation's musical development.

Thanks to Scottish Arts Council head honcho Richard Holloway, El Sistema has latterly been brought to Scotland and renamed Big Noise, beginning at the nation's geographical heart, the formerly-insalubrious Raploch housing scheme in Stirling. We didn't see much of the orchestra in its new Scots incarnation (it only started in June, and Yentob seemed unwilling to leave the safety of his car to probe Raploch's scary boulevards in the same way he had in gun-plagued parts of South America).

But imagine: on every Scottish street corner, an orchestra of well-adjusted young people happily belting out Tchaikovsky's Fourth. Venceremos!