The Bill ITV1, 8pm

Eastenders, BBC1, 7.30pm

It is utterly frightening to think that I have lived all my adult life with The Bill on my TV screen. I remember the first series, back in 1984, after a successful 1983 pilot.

I watched it religiously. I was a teenager in a small town; TV was my only escape.

I even know ridiculous trivia about the show's stars. (Graham Cole, who plays PC Tony Stamp, was a cyberman in Doctor Who, you know - back in the day when cybermen were just blokes in silver suits, not big scary robots like they are today. But I digress.) However, I am amazed - after giving up on the show around 1991 when I finally hit the bright lights of that big city of Edinburgh and, well, got a life - that some 17 years later it's still on our screens.

Still, at least now I'm being paid to watch it, I thought, as I sat down to take in episode 606, Jack of Hearts.

Okay, it's not actually 17 years since I last watched The Bill, which would have been impossible. It's just there, an unavoidable part of British life that sucks you in before you know it. I always seemed to tune in to part one of the show's "serials within a serial", and would have to watch for four weeks before finding out whodunit, and why.

This episode, however, was old-school; one story, all neatly wrapped up in an hour. After turning into a bit of a soap opera in the early noughties, these days The Bill has gone back to its 1980s roots and delivers the occasional three- or four-parter, interspersed with good, solid, one-hour mysteries like this one.

The opening scenes were a bit dodgy - finding out DCI Meadows makes a mean Victoria sponge was a bit superfluous to the story - but it had everything a viewer could want from such a show - mystery, violence, comedy and romance, all mixed up together to create a case as perfect as DCI Meadows's cake.

We saw nasty villain Chaz Cooper run over Meadow's godson, but we knew from the start, of course, that he wasn't the intended victim. And so followed a complicated yet plausible path to Keith Jordan, father of Kieran, the run-down godson and Meadows's old mate, a man financially ruined and on the brink, up to his neck in criminal activity and full of guilt.

It was a troubling case for Meadows from the off, and there was no happy ending for the DCI as he had to nick his mate, as well as discover said mate's wife, with whom he's secretly in love, is carrying on with their other mate.

All in all a satisfying hour of TV drama, which The Bill's producers just seem to be able to churn out. It might not be cool to say it, but you can do a lot worse than settle down to The Bill these days. Sometimes the oldies definitely are the best.

Over in Walford last night, EastEnders, another show to have survived for a staggering 20-plus years, was a mish mash of silly stories and ongoing sagas, all, quite frankly, ridiculous.

Poor Charlie fell victim to a local spider, which we were led to believe arrived with Billy's bananas, in one of the most pointless stories to come out of the Square for, oh, days. And how much longer can they string out the Ronnie/Roxie/Sean family-feud storyline?

Apparently, those who leave the big soaps take a career step down the ladder if they end up in the likes of The Bill. However, on this showing, surely it must be the other way around?