After last week's spectacularly unconvincing foray into saving Africa (usually the last refuge of a doomed statesperson), Birgitte Nyborg returned to the centre of Denmark's political life for the concluding pair of episodes in series two. Back amid themes of political infighting, media skulduggery and personal relationships under pressure, Borgen had, amid sighs of relief, come home to where it belonged.

In the Sixties, self-appointed guardians of the nation’s morals were pretty steamed up about bingo. More so even than about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Fyfe Robertson, the BBC’s bewhiskered roaming chronicler, said the game was “the most mindless ritual achieved in half a million years of evolution.” His own brainlessness mattered not a jot.

For a man who lives in an agreeable region of France, Jonathan Meades grew strangely passionate in the course of this fascinating excursion around Essex. The thuggish-looking narrator travelled by small, functional Toyota rather than Magical Mystery Tour-style charabanc, though the latter would have been perfectly apt for tales of Cockneys seeking escape in the county described by one sneering commentator as "the dustbin of London".

As a parable on the dissolution of the American Dream, the story of self-made billionaire David Siegel is almost too good to be true. Much like another recent documentary – Bart Layton’s spellbinding The Imposter – Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles, broadcast last night in BBC Four's Storyville strand, lays out the kind of story that could only be told by a documentarian, because coming from a screenwriter it would sound both too neat and too far-fetched.

The television channels have been making documentaries about our boys, and indeed girls, in Afghanistan for the best part of a decade. We’re used by now to the imagery, which mainly consists of dust, joshing, weaponry and boredom. Prince Harry: Frontline Afghanistan was an occasion to stir an extra ingredient into the brew: dust, joshing, weaponry and boredom, plus a chap who when he loses at strip poker makes the front page of every newspaper in the western world.

My only real complaint about the ever-excellent Good Wife is that they cram so much into every episode that it's notoriously difficult to keep track of all the plots, subplots, new names and cunningly tangled relationships. It's a bit like a televisual zip file, where you have to unpack it before you can extract all the contents.

As political campaigns go, Bob Servant's bid to win a by-election in Broughty Ferry (a real-life seaside suburb of Dundee) looks more like a drunken practical joke, or the result of an ill-judged bet. A fluent and shameless liar whose only credentials are a lifetime of dodginess, Servant's motives are venal and his ambitions entirely self-centred. He knows nothing about politics or, apparently, anything else, expect perhaps selling hamburgers, which he has done for many decades.

We love the snow but hate the cold, and for almost 300 years Northern European winters were bitterly, catastrophically cold. Crops failed, there were famine riots and people died of hypothermia during the Little Ice Age. From the 16^th to the 19^th centuries, no population suffered at the hands of Old Man Winter quite as much as those in the Low Countries. Winters were long, life was harsh, but in Brussels Pieter Bruegel the Elder was singlehandedly inventing the winter landscape of our imaginations.

It was surely a no-brainer for ITV to produce a series about grand houses presented by Julian Fellowes with stories about those who lived and worked in them. But while it may sound wholly derivative to many, at least Fellowes - unlike a raft of celebrities presenting television programmes these days - has the wherewithal. He's an acknowledged expert in the field - although (wittily, I think) the titles were a neat rip-off of Downton Abbey's and he shamelessly plugged his upstairs-downstairs drama in the opening scenes.

I somehow avoided the period medical drama phenomenon that Call the Midwife became in its first series until the Christmas special. As befits the holiday season its storyline was trite, focusing on a teenage mother who miraculously managed to single-handedly give birth in a cupboard with no mess and little fuss.