Ah, the Olympics! Coming too soon to an overcrowded, overstrained and overleveraged metropolis near you. In case you weren't already perturbed enough by visions of the impending onslaught of tourists, athletes and a Stay-Puft Boris Johnson lumbering round the city's choked streets trying to pretend that he is the world-class leader of a world-class city, tonight's Dispatches: Olympic Tickets for Sale (Channel 4) was on hand to add a dash of fury to your nightmares.

Three quarters of the Games' tickets, the London Organising Committee (Locog) promised, repeatedly, would be "affordable and accessible" to ordinary people. And 75% have indeed been allocated by ballot to them. But not 75% of every kind of seat. A disproportionate number of the nicest remain in that other, shinier, comfier quarter. Oh, and not 75% of every event either. For the events ordinary people really, really want to attend, such as the opening ceremony or the men's 100m final, the percentage drops to nearer a third. The rest go to competitors, Olympic officials, the media, sponsors and hospitality providers.

Hospitality providers, not incidentally, are organisations who then bundle the tickets into decidedly unaffordable, inaccessible packages – tickets on their own cannot be sold for more than 20% of their face value – and flog them largely to corporate jolliers. Dispatches probed a little further – their investigations somewhat hampered of course by the fact that Locog is a private company and therefore not required to disclose … well, very much at all – and found that the provision of hospitality also frequently includes access to the Olympic route network. That means the London roads closed off for the duration – apparently the Games revenue will more than offset the costs of inducing so many extra strokes and cardiac arrests among drivers, bus users and anyone else attempting to live a normal life south of Watford this summer – and ostensibly intended to ferry athletes about. Hmm.

They also seem often to include accommodation hoteliers agreed to discount for competitors in order to give London the edge over other cities during the bid, which has pissed them off almost as much as the road-closing has upset the cabbies. Locog might just as well set fire to a dozen pearly kings and queens on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square and have done with it.

All in all it was a mass of murky waters and opaque systems, infused with a sense of money calling to money, those on top taking care of their own and the plebs somehow left scrabbling for scraps of a meal for which they had already paid more than £9bn. Ah, the commercial Corinthian spirit. Fatter, richer, shittier. Roll on July.

Storyville: If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (BBC4) painted a broader, deeper and more detailed picture of what happens when ideals become corrupted. It followed the story of Dan McGowan, the son of a New York cop, Catholic high-schooler, track runner, scholarship winner, college business major and then PR man whose green consciousness was raised by an environmental activist group that showed him films of the depredations being wrought by logging companies, whalers, oil companies et al.

He became a part of the movement just as it was becoming frustrated with the (non-) effects of traditional forms of environmental campaigning. After a series of violent police reactions to peaceful protests, radicalised individuals including Dan coalesced into the ELF and started carrying out attacks of their own. McGowan took part in two arson attacks. The ELF fragmented when some members – McGowan not among them – wanted to start targeting people rather than property.

Three years later, McGowan was arrested and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, which – in keeping with the attorney general's view of the ELF as a domestic terrorist organisation – includes an "enhancement" under US terrorism legislation. The film gave time to those who saw their buildings burned by Dan and his the ELF cohorts but it was hard – especially in the face of McGowan's deeply held beliefs, articulate denunciation of the huge companies who destroy so much without compunction or effective condemnation and his family's calm courage as he faced his sentence – to feel that even massive property damage should fall under laws intended to punish those responsible for the deaths of innocent people. Do even its most unblinking supporters want the legal currency devalued so far and so fast? But of course one poxy liberal, bleeding-hearted, muesli-munching Guardian columnist's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, and so the argument will doubtless rage until the seas run dry. Which, of course, shouldn't be long now.