Last night's TV: Fish! A Japanese Obsession, The Great Sperm Race and Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

They're big fans of fish, the Japanese, the fresher the better. Ideally, served still wriggling
Fish: a Japanese Obsession
'It's all lovely' ... Fish: A Japanese Obsession. Photograph: BBC4 BBC

You know that thing people who like really rare steak say, that they want it "still mooing"? Well, this is the fishy equivalent. In a themed Tokyo restaurant, the angler and writer Charles Rangeley Wilson sits dangling his rod from a model boat. The pond is artificial but the fish are real, and soon he catches a snapper - actually, to be fair, Aki, his translator, does. The fish is whisked away, to be cooked, Charles thinks, while they sing a celebratory song. And then the snapper comes back on a plate.

"Oh, it's sushi," says Charles.

"I thought they were going to grill it." The flesh has been removed from both sides of the fish, and lies in thin strips on crushed ice, with pieces of lemon and the carcass of the snapper arranged decoratively beside it.

But there's another surprise. "Shit, it moved!" says Charles. And he's not imagining it. The carcass is twitching, waggling its fins and opening and closing its mouth - gasping out its famous last fishy words, perhaps. How is it possible that a fish which has had its flesh removed, and is bent double with a wooden stick through its head, is still alive? Skilful slicing, I imagine. Charles seems a bit shaken.

"It seems to me a little cruel," says Charles.

"Yeah, cruel," echoes Aki, smiling.

"Just do it, just eat, forget about the complicated thing, this is Japan." By the complicated thing, I think he means the morality of stripping the flesh from a living creature.

This is just one of the extraordinary scenes in Fish! A Japanese Obsession (BBC4), Charles RW's journey around Japan to get to the bottom of the country's passion for fish. He meets koi carp worth £50,000 each, and a rock singer who wears a real tuna head on stage (Tuna Turner?). He dives for shellfish with the sea ladies of Ise, and learns how to remove the deadly poison from the delicious fugu fish. And he puts on a panda suit to go paragliding. No, I have no idea what that has to do with fish, either, and nor does he, but it's lovely - a waving panda flying over the rice paddies.

It's all lovely. I was a pushover because I too have a thing about fish, and although I've never been to Japan I've always wanted to. It looks beautiful, of course, and Charles brings a nice dry amusement to it all - not mocking, just sometimes a little surprised (it's a thin line).

Just the one complaint, then: the length. An hour and a half is half an hour too long for a documentary like this - for just about any documentary, in fact. I think its length would have put people off, and that's a shame because, as I said, it was lovely. And it's not as if there weren't bits that couldn't have been trimmed - Charles's interviews for an interpreter, for example. Half an hour could have easily been skilfully sliced off without killing it.

In The Great Sperm Race (Channel 4), the story of conception is given a cake with "eat me" written on it, so that individual sperms become the size of human beings and are played by them (and the inside of the vagina is played by a valley in the Canadian Rockies, intriguingly). It's like that scene from Woody Allen's Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex but drawn out over an hour and without the jokes. Quite informative, but also slightly tiresome and annoying.

We're asked to "think about it from the point of view of the sperm", but I'm finding that hard because I'm pretty sure sperm don't have a point of view. Snapper possibly, sperm definitely not - otherwise every male ejaculation would be mass murder on an apocalyptic scale.

That Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC2), is an angry man. He's an angry man, that Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2. And he says thing over and over again, getting angrier and angrier, shouting louder and louder. He says them over again, getting angrier and angrier. Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2. He is clever and funny, but everything else and everyone else (especially people who are more successful than him) is stupid and silly. And that makes him very angry. Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2.

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