"It is clear not much will be discussed in government." "All interviews should be notified to Number 10 in advance." "Gordon is very hard to negotiate with - very defensive." "Geoff Hoon was gung-ho." Dispatches’ first batch of extracts from David Blunkett’s diaries, The Blunkett Tapes, don’t reveal anything the media hasn’t bored us all to tears with for the last ten years.

Where Alan Clark’s diaries were an across the board confessional, set on telling the truth no matter how potentially damaging, Blunkett’s extracts - as chosen by Channel 4 - rarely got beyond journalistic cliché and smug self-justification. Whether his stand-offs were with cabinet colleagues, civil servants, the security services, the police or the teachers he was always right and they were always wrong.

There was footage of him at a teacher’s conference insisting things were getting better while the teachers were insisting they were not. Women colleagues lined up to put it in a delicate way: "David has trouble taking people with him." I can see that the drive to get things done can help you find the willpower to dictate diaries night after night, but is the associated sense of your own infallibility not going to limit the quality of what you record?

Blunkett did confess he told his office to ignore Number 10’s injunction to notify them about interviews. While it’s not surprising he did that, maybe there’s some initial surprise he revealed it. But not when you give it a second’s thought. He might have been bucking the system, but it was in service of his usual hunger to come out on top at all costs.

Looking at it in a purely venal way I’m beginning to see the advantages of being a member of the cabinet. Whatever you write afterwards will - at least for a time - be a commodity with a hefty price tag. Channel 4 seem to have been so set on getting the commodity that it’s been too eager to sacrifice journalistic balance for the privilege. The programme was startlingly uncritical. But unless the said extracts were seriously unrepresentative it seems like the main missing ingredient in David Blunkett’s Diaries is Blunkett himself. I won’t be rushing out to buy them.

Tru Calling is back, with good and evil being fought over once again by the Californian idea of gorgeous. Last night, a dead female cop killed in a collision with a perfect storm was in the morgue and Eliza Dushku’s Tru happened to be there. The cop came to life for a second and gave Tru her mission for the episode: "Save me." So Tru headed back in time to rewrite history and save the cop from Jack Harper (Jason Priestley), Tru’s evil counterpart in the fate game. His raison d’être, as a "preserver of fate", is keeping people who are meant to die from not dying. Or, more specifically, stopping Tru saving them. But after an extended battle of wits and strategy with her nemesis and a scary ride on a boat into the rewound storm, Tru did save the ungrateful cop from her fated death.

While Blunkett seems to want to write history to put himself in a good - if boring - light, Tru Calling explores the fantasy of getting a second chance. I’m not much interested in Tru’s special powers being taken on to a heroic level. But, more mundanely, pressing the rewind button allowed her, for instance, to forestall a teacher’s attempts to humiliate her in front of her classmates. So I began to think it could be fun to revisit all your old petty failures and come out on top. Though in my case, no doubt, the best I could hope for would be - as Beckett put it - to fail better.