Vivacious blonde presenter Cherry Healey’s latest three-part series aims to show how a dangerously large proportion of the nation’s youth are abusing themselves with booze, drugs and food “until their young bodies and minds are ready for retirement". Part one – about alcohol - opens, predictably, on the streets of Newcastle where the usual array of working class Geordie pissheads they snag for these programmes are staggering about Bigg Market and slurring that they just don’t care.

“Everything has happened so quickly,” Katherine Glendenning mused as the new series of The Paradise shot off the block. She'd been en voyage for a year, losing a father and gaining a husband, but now Katherine was back. Moray’s melancholy sojourn on coffee and cognac in Paris – “thoroughly French in every way,” he found it, with less originality than we might have expected – had been suddenly cut short too, and he was hot-footing it back to the waiting arms of Denise. The dramatic rapiers were drawn.

Man Down opens with a tried and tested sitcom premise; middle-aged-and-going-nowhere-fast Dan is being dumped by his much more mature, high-achieving girlfriend, Naomi. She's tired of his juvenile daydreaming - could a hovercraft be powered by farts? - and the fact that he lives in a flat attached to his parents' house. And he still hasn't replaced a lightbulb that blew weeks ago.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the creators of Scandinavia's drama boom could be forgiven if they started behaving like a collection of hysterical Justin Biebers. Not only are their home-grown series hits around the world, they're also being slavishly copied by other broadcasters. The American version of The Killing has been followed by a US take on Danish/Swedish joint effort The Bridge, starring Diane Kruger and set on the Tex/Mex border. Now here's an Anglo-French spin on it, replacing the titular bridge with our beloved Channel Tunnel.

What the Dickens is happening to wildlife television? At the back end of all those Atttenborough films they have a segment in which they explain how they got the miracle money shot of the chorus line of orcas, the war ballet of the giraffes, the Saharan ant colony. Well, forget all that. Television appears to have decreed that, wildlife-wise, pets are the new black. 

Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India.

Period dramas are all the rage, and you can imagine Breathless being plucked with forceps from a steaming cauldron in which bubbled Call the Midwife, The Hour, Mad Men, Heartbeat and inevitably a sprig of Downton, which couldn't hurt. It's 1961, the National Health Service is still regarded as one of the wonders of the known universe, and women are foolish little things who wear stylish frocks, are obsessed with hair and nails and keep getting themselves up the duff.

In some ways Malachi Davies, one of the titular “truckers” in this new BBC comedy drama, brings to mind Frank Gallagher of Shameless. Admittedly Davies, played by Stephen Tompkinson, has a job - but it is a job that is as central to the identity of the character as Gallagher’s avoidance of one ever was. Some of the similarities are pretty superficial: the two characters share the love for a drink, a seeming inability to get a decent haircut and even an ex played by Maggie O’Neill.

Congo has been where European adventurers have for generations gone in search of fortune. Probably not making a fortune, historian Dan Snow, an affable, energetic sort, was keen to tell us about this vast country, the size of Western Europe and these days known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, previously Zaire, before that Belgian Congo.

The ballerina Sylvie Guillem was always out on a limb, even when she was the classical star at the Royal Ballet in the '90s and early '00s. She was French, she was tall, she was unbelievably flexible, she was staggeringly charismatic, and she had no fear of setting her terms and saying “non” if they didn’t suit.