Last night's TV: True Stories: The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories

This lovely little film about a quiet Bulgarian town even made insecticide seem romantic

The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (More4)
'Todor Pdrnikov plays his badly tuned piano, boogie-woogie style' ... True Stories: The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories. Photograph: More4

You wouldn't want to be a kid growing up in the small town of Belene, on the banks of the Danube in northern Bulgaria. There's not much to do around here. You can go down to the swamp and play in the old communist concentration camp, a place your mother probably used to work, whacking party-strayers with a club for growing their hair too long. These days the camp is home to a nervous horse, a few pigs and pigeons, a lot of long black snakes, and a murderer called Ahmed Hasanov.

Ahmed seems all right, to be honest.

No? That doesn't appeal? OK, so you could go round Todor Pdrnikov's place, to listen to him playing his badly tuned piano, boogie-woogie style - not really recommended. That's about it then, there's nothing else, apart from running along after the mosquito-spraying truck - cycling if you're the one of the four kids in town with a bike - playing in the billowing white clouds of insecticide. It may cause all sorts of health problems, but hey, it's fun. And who cares if it takes decades off your life? Life wasn't going to be so great, anyway.

Because there's not much to do in Belene when you grow up, either, especially now there are no whacking jobs going at the concentration camp. You can join the army. Or you can go round to Todor's to listen to him play - still not recommended. Or you can just sit around without a job, hoping the nuclear power plant will open one day, moaning about the mosquitoes. Which is what just about everyone does in Belene. Apart from Ivan and Pavel, the mosquito disinfection squad, who are busy operating the truck.

It's quite surprising that True Stories: The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (More4) was made at all. It must have been a difficult pitch for Andrey Paounov, whose work this is ...

"I was wondering if you'd like to finance my film?"

"Sure, what it is?"

"It's a long, slow film about a town in Bulgaria you've never heard of, where nothing at all happens."

"Sounds fab, here's lots of money."

Actually, from the credits it looks as if Andrey had to go to an awful lot of people to get his money. But hats off to those who had the imagination to stump up. And to Andrey for making it. Because there's something wonderful about the result.

Sure, it's painfully slow. But it needs to be, to lull you down into the pace of Belene's life, for you to get a true feeling for the place. Watching it is like being washed over by Belene, bathed in nothingness. And it's sad as hell, but also full of humour and humanity, a portrait of a town still coming to terms with the end of communism; a town with a murky past, an uncertain future, and which, if we're honest, is making a bit of a mess of the present. It's beautiful to look at, too: the film, not Belene, which isn't. Even - especially - the children playing in the billowing white insecticide behind Ivan and Pavel's truck are beautiful, like nymphs in the clouds or porpoises tumbling in the wake of a ship.

There's nothing of beauty in Autopsy: Emergency Room (Channel 4). No, I tell a lie, models Anna and Dennis are quite easy on the eye. But what the hell are they doing here.

They stand stark naked, trimmed and shaved respectively, like porn stars (I'm told), while Gunther von Hagens saws up (real) human bodies with his giant salami slicer. Sometimes he will come and prod his live specimens, or draw on them, or ask the studio audience what would happen if he stuck this long knife into Anna, just here below her right breast. "Who of you will think it's fatal?"

Then he goes back to his cadaver to replicate the stabbing, before slicing it up to find out what happened.

It's masquerading as an experiment, and as educational (after all, you learn the best place to stab someone if you want to kill them). He's got a top doctor there in an attempt to legitimise it all.

But look around, at the lighting - the place looks like a dungeon. Look at Gunther's hat, his creepy black-felt fedora. How many doctors have you seen in one of them? And look at Dennis and Anna ... well maybe you shouldn't.

This is not science, it's theatre, some kind of sinister necro-porn.

I'm going to go and read the small print on my donor card, and if there's any chance of my body going to Gunther, then I'm ripping it up, I'm afraid. Maybe my problem is that I'm not German (actually I am, a bit), but I think this show is really, really horrid.