Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (BBC2) | iPlayer

Newsnight (BBC2) | iPlayer

Camelot (C4) | 4oD

The Apprentice (BBC1) | iPlayer

Luther (BBC1) | iPlayer

The manner of the death gave hope, and was a grand argument for the state of living, which was something of a surprise. The week-long media debate that followed gave little hope to the idea of ever being out of the shouting range of people who believe something so passionately – lucky souls – they become happily unfettered by such niggling considerations as empathy, greyness, remembering coins have other sides and letting you finish your sentence. Which wasn't.

The manner of Peter Smedley's death in Terry Pratchett's Choosing to Die documentary gave hope because of his dignity, because it reminds the rest of us that we can at least choose to live life well. Even after he'd taken the sugared barbiturates which would close down, fast, his central nervous system, and slipped in a little chocolate to counter the taste, his thoughts were for others. Dignified thanks to everyone there, including crew. A last handshake for a near-to-tears Terry Pratchett, Peter struggling and failing to reach what had obviously once been a ramrod position of courtesy; and a warmly stern "be strong, my darling" to wife Christine. Then, suddenly, for a few seconds, he was choking, pretty nastily actually. He was, I suppose rightly, refused water ("not now, just sleep") and within seconds deep unnatural snores, then sleeping silence. The cameraman – I assume director/producer Charlie Russell – veered it towards Pratchett, doing much busy spectacles-rubbing, for the very end, and no one's sure when, quite, the end came.

Dignity to the end, and a life well lived. We had seen bits of Peter, earlier, in this quite superlative programme; one of those that can, truly, change things, as I believe this will. Its strength was in its subtle quiet professionalism, yes: and some in the interplay between the jaunty, dapper wordsmith Pratchett, terrified through his early-onset Alzheimer's of losing the "wordsmith" tag, and loyal young assistant Rob, who helped and drove and empathised but was, like most of us, a bit more… aghast at it all. Its real strength lay, though, not in the high drama but in the many things unstressed, just captured by the very making of this urgently crafted, bravely broadcast programme.

Peter, a courteous 71-year-old, still with a bit of dash, and a loving stylish wife, and a fat bit of money. A lucky life, apart from the fast-degenerative motor neurone disease. Still, he'd chosen to end it. As had the far younger Andrew Colgan, articulate and fun and beset with MS: assistant Rob, in particular, oozed thoughts that this was too early for Andrew. Yet both had chosen to go to Switzerland, and end it. Crucially, neither Andrew nor Peter nor Christine took time to see the mountains, see anything except the End. There wasn't even much emotion, from Christine, because the racking arguments and debates, and farewells, were obviously far past.

No, this was, for Andrew and Peter, a necessary fast flight into damp Zurich and a cab to a horrid little blue corrugated hut on an industrial estate. And funny little coloured-wrong coffee cups for the tea, and faintly tacky wall paintings, and Ikea furniture, and the incredibly nice but very Swiss lady death-helper, with the poison.

And this is the point. Can you truly think Peter, with his comfortable home and brandy snifters and memories and easy money for future carers… or Andrew, with his wisdom and grins… do you think either of them would have chosen to do this, take poison in a foreign country in essentially a rented teenager's bedsit beside a car showroom while rain grubbied the snow in the laughable garden – unless they had been utterly poleaxed, pushed beyond misery, beyond feeling even human, by these two hell-born diseases: shitting and stuttering more every day and watching their own limbs gnarl into malevolent strangers? And just wise enough to get to the End before their bodies jumped them again and denied them even that, because their own home country denies them the End, and even Switzerland denies them the End once they can't speak properly?

We cannot know the true sufferings inflicted by these diseases, but this programme, the circumstances of the deaths, let us begin to imagine how unconscionable they must be. Not that everyone who so suffers so opts, of course. That this is the case was easily and graciously acknowledged in the subsequent gripping Newsnight debate by all three panellists in favour of the programme; warm praise from them for the chirpy cabbie in the programme, Mick Gordelier, who had toyed with Dignitas but opted for another turn of the dice, and hospice care. That had been his choice, you see, as Peter's had been his. If I'd watched this debate without seeing the documentary, I might then have had more time for the Bishop of Exeter. But, still swimming with anguished thoughts of how fabulously grim the suffering must have been for them to choose that last day – airport bloody security, rain, cranes, burping traffic, slush, tea, death – I found it inordinately depressing that his "convictions" wouldn't allow him to proffer the same generosity of choice. Lucky bishop, happily unfettered… And, oh, of this week's "900" – shock – complaints to the BBC over the programme, I learnt yesterday, 750 were lodged before it was even shown. Yes, that bunch again.

I'm loving Camelot. Merlin is played to enigmatic skinhead perfection by Joseph Fiennes. It's got Tamsin Egerton and Eva Green. War plans are yelled at Brian Blessed-level and the accents are thrillingly all over the place. The scenery is wild and dark and windy and Welsh, the scripts complex enough, the sex dirty and the murders sensual. Only problem is the boy Arthur. OK, his sword/stone stunt, atop a seriously slimy scary waterfall, was the best that's yet been filmed, but he still looks like an American grunge band drummer, and you can almost see the cuckold horns growing already from his fluffy goat hoodie. Maybe he'll, er, die soon. Personally, if recasting, I'd think next time of Idris Elba. Why not a black Arthur?

Elba almost single-handedly holds together Luther, which has been recommissioned and returned to us on Tuesday. It opened with him eating his gun, then reprieving himself, possibly a metaphor for the show's survival after a bit of a mauling last year; then going on to yet another ludicrous plot hammered along solely by our collective goodwill for the star. Good cliffhanger, though; I'll be back, and am glad this is.

I don't know if there will be any more accidentally eloquent exposition of the generation gap this year than popped up in The Apprentice, to which I'm now shamefully addicted again. I'd been told this year's mob were less management-speak than before, less "I'm a people-person, me" and "born for the top" and that guff, and they thankfully were, but I hadn't been told that what they also were was equally thick.

Glenn was taking "soundings" at a bowling club prior to helping launch an ill-judged freebie mag for the over-60s. Not a demographic closest to his anything. The nice savvy bowlers enjoying a glass read the Economist, Viz, the Oldie; they didn't want to be patronised, and they possibly wanted their young entrepreneurs to recognise the difference between 60 and 95, between planning another skiing holiday and starting to wonder where the laces go in the slippers. "The focus," said one, "should be on fun, and enjoyment." Glenn cut in. "Got it. Yeah, and… humour? I mean, I don't know whether you guys take any notice of that?" The quiet looks exchanged, after this humdinger of un-knowledge, were classic: not outraged, just pitying. The magazine title the team settled on was Hip Replacement. They lost. Woefully wonderful guilty viewing.