Ventriloquist Nina Conti, along with her wisecracking sidekick Monkey, has emerged as one of the sharper comedy acts of the past few years but Nina Conti Clowning Around was an uneasy, far from comic film. Embarking on a new direction, away from “entertaining drunk adults” as Monkey put it so winningly, Conti set herself to trying to entertain sick children as a hospital clown, or “giggle doctor” to give them their title at the Theodora Children’s Charity which was her starting point.

The story of the 1964 Smethwick election, with its unofficial Tory slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour,” is well known. The successful Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, subsequently became MP for Portsmouth North, 1979-97, where he advocated the similarly opportunistic but less controversial cause of the naval dockyards, and died in 2013. What really shocked about this often eye-wateringly revealing documentary was the extensive footage of the caustic casual racism prevalent at the time.

When a documentary about Irish rock music starts with footage of late-period Bono shuffling about awkwardly dressed in black, my first impulse is to check my iTunes in case he’s surreptitiously shat another album into my computer. The second is to reach for the remote. Thankfully though, this was just a glimpse of what was to come down Ireland's rocky road. I had more than enough time to steel myself as we sped back in time to a point when the fledgling blues scene was first making an impact in the country.

Earlier tonight, I read - on Twitter, so I’m not vouching for its accuracy - that more people have now signed a petition to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson at the BBC than to take stronger action against female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. FGM, as actress Zawe Ashton (Fresh Meat) quickly finds out in a moving documentary for Comic Relief, is a hard thing to talk about, because vaginas are hard to talk about.

In and Out of the Kitchen (***), created and written by Miles Jupp, was first heard on Radio 4, a delightful spoof of celebrity chefs and our modern obsessions with food and having the perfect kitchen. Now Jupp and director Mandie Fletcher have brought it to television.

Philippa Perry, 20 years a psychotherapist, was the dashing narrator of this history of 300 years of agony aunts (or uncles). Wearing a bright orange coat, she cycled between libraries, universities, newspaper and magazine offices, looking at centuries-old publications and interviewing contemporary writers. It was a fact-studded visual essay, but in spite of the raciness of its subject, oddly bland.

Hooray! The BBC has learned its lesson from the "Mumblegate" furore that erupted around last year's adaptation of Jamaica Inn, and ensured that even the most unwashed and toothless Cornish yokel in this all-new Poldark is almost 90 per cent intelligible. As the central character Ross Poldark, Aidan Turner (of Hobbit fame) is a model of robust actorly diction. 

Another tough night in with Jimmy McGovern. Banished may have taken ship to 18th-century New South Wales, whither the first British convicts have been expelled to a penal colony guarded by red-coated soldiers. But peer past the uniforms, the rifles and the tricorn hats and we have been lured yet again to McGovern’s favourite hangout, stuck somewhere between a rock and a hard place.

The owl – symbol of wisdom, harbinger of death – is a powerful if disparate symbol in human mythology worldwide. But this outstanding visual essay provided a riveting array of astonishing facts to make of the bird something even more remarkable than the myth.

“Something strident and stirring – play to us now, please!” demands Martin Clunes’ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the piano-playing vicar’s wife, on apprehending that their conversation is being eavesdropped on. Sherlock Holmes himself could hardly have responded more adeptly to frustrate the eavesdropper, and as Conan Doyle’s pursuit of the intruder leads him to a sinister, candle-lit shrine containing the vicar’s daughter’s long-lost favourite doll, it’s clear that ITV has a new thriller both strident and stirring on its hands.