'For over a century I have lived in secret, hiding in the shadows... alone in the world!" Ah, give it a rest, Charlie Bird! I groan. Being a foreign correspondent isn't that bad! But wait! It isn't Charlie Bird, it's Stefan Salvatore from The Vampire Diaries. He's a hunky vampire with a rectangular head who is in an eternal struggle with an evil, smirking, floppy-haired vampire with a pointed chin, all for the love of an orphaned human girl who looks like a beige Posh Spice (an ageless supernatural being in her own right). Sounds complicated? Well, it will be familiar territory to fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (brilliant), Twilight (stupid) or True Blood (ridiculous) who know that nothing says "romance" quite like passive-aggressive vampire stalkers with no sense of humour, who have problems with self-control and are in love with people too young for them (by centuries).

But instead of being a tabloid-friendly court case-in-the-making, we're meant to assume that the attraction between Stefan (he of the rectangular head) and Elena (she of the Posh-face) is a mystical bond that transcends mere words. Although, for a bond that's beyond words (and belief) they sure do a lot of talking. This is because The Vampire Diaries is scripted by Kevin Williamson, who also wrote Dawson's Creek and thinks that teenagers converse like self-obsessed, indecisive, media studies lecturers. In Dawson's Creek, Williamson broke the "show don't tell" rule repeatedly by making his characters have long convoluted conversations about their stupid feelings. Already in The Vampire Diaries there have been lots of conversations involving the words "I'm scared" and "we have a connection" and there's been loads of familiarly self-aware dialogue and a plethora of creepy Dawson-esque seduction techniques (watching ladies from afar before sneaking up close to stare intensely at them).

Sometimes it's entertaining, with a good supporting cast, some good character chemistry, and some sparkily-written incidental dialogue, but after a while it's hard to shake the feeling you're reading an actual teenage vampire diary and it makes me want to shout, "Stop talking about your stupid feelings already and go kill people, you stupid vampire! You're worse than Charlie Bird!"

It did make me wonder about the head behind it all. I may have mentioned already that Stefan the hunky vampire has a rectangular noggin. And he's almost as rectangular-headed as James Van Der Beek who played Dawson in Dawson's Creek (Dawson's head actually had corners). It all made me want to see a picture of Kevin Williamson. I assume the telly creator's head must also be bizarrely quadrilateral and that this whole project is actually a distracting ruse. "Don't look at my freakish parallelo-head!" I imagine him shouting whilst shielding his face with his hands like the Elephant Man. "Look at The Vampire Diaries instead! That's why I made it."

Skins is a much more successful work of fantasy than The Vampire Diaries. The fourth series, like the others, depicts a Peter Pan-style world without adult authority (the adults are, as they are in my immediate circle of friends, grotesques, monsters and buffoons) in which fashionable youngsters imbibe and fornicate without reprimand. This series began with a suicide and this week's episode examines how that death has affected Emily's relationship with her girlfriend Naomi – and it's touching and sad. It's about a real loss of innocence, in which Emily has to put away childish things (the drinking and the sexing and the mopeding and the dressing up in Mexican bandit costumes) to work on her relationship. Which is quite a grown-up message for a programme that initially seemed designed to create moral panic/tabloid-orgasms.

Now, Skins isn't very realistic, but it's when I realised that it wasn't meant to be that I relaxed and learned to love it. If you want a fly-on-the-wall dramatisation of what it's really like to be a teenager, you'd be better off with the humiliations of The Inbetweeners, Press Gang or my own diary entries for the summer of '89 (available on request). Skins is about what it feels like to be a teenager – delusional, superior, in love, drugged, trapped, despairing, glorious, on the cusp of greatness, disgraced – it's all Shakespearean emotions in a dream-like space. If you want to be pedantic, when it comes to realistic detail, these "teenagers" are about as realistic as Stefan the vampire, but like real teenagers Skins does have a lot of heart.

While death is an occasional plot device in the aforementioned programmes, it makes its presence felt throughout Mo, a television film about former Northern Ireland secretary of state, Mo Mowlam, featuring an on-form Julie Walters in the title role. Skins and The Vampire Diaries deal in different ways with teenage feelings of immortality; in Mo, an idiosyncratic middle-aged politician spends the last decade of her life battling a brain tumour that she knows is going to kill her.

As a biopic it bucks the usual dramatic dogma that success in both life and career are somehow incompatible. It paints a lovely picture of Mo's relationship with her husband Jon Norton (David Haig), and deftly covers her interactions with David Trimble and Gerry Adams without becoming an episode of Bremner, Bird and Fortune (to further avoid this pitfall, Mo's boss Tony Blair never appears onscreen, like Charlie from Charlie's Angels, Charles Saatchi, or God). Furthermore, they never make Mo a saint; some of her behaviour is reckless and her anger at being passed over by Blair towards the end is presented as irrational. In general, however, Mo is a celebration of that very British virtue of just getting on with it, and so it's devastating to watch as her body gives out and she wonders how much of her past behaviour was attributable to the personality-distorting affects of her tumour.

This sense of dualism is also present in author Terry Pratchett's eloquent and powerful Richard Dimbleby Lecture, delivered brilliantly by actor Tony Robinson as the author looked on (it's a testament to Robinson's skill that this never looked unnatural or forced). Pratchett has a rare strain of Alzheimer's disease which he described as like being followed around by an idiot. His lecture, Shaking Hands with Death, was an impassioned plea for the right to determine the manner of his own death at some point in the future. It was beautifully written and delivered and whatever your views on this issue it was worth viewing. I'm guessing this is the sort of televisual essay that John Logie Baird had in mind when he foresaw the edifying educational effects of his cathode-ray-tube, and before television producers discovered jump-cut editing and glamour models and decided they hated "words".

And so Pratchett (through Robinson) movingly discussed his father's death, outlined a legal framework that could be put in place to allow "assisted death", and explained simply how he would like to die, "before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the 'Brompton cocktail' some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death."

pfreyne@tribune.ie