Many commentators have professed bafflement at the tangled layers of Hidden, as it probed into a sick and murky past while apparently dead characters came back to haunt the present. Right to the end, writer Ronan Bennett kept his cards carefully concealed, so we still don't know who was really behind the sinister "Helpdesk" and its slick dial-a-killer operating system. Or at least it was slick at killing everybody except protagonists Harry (Phil Glenister) and Gina (Thekla Reuten), who somehow managed to wriggle away from their pursuers on a record-breaking number of occasions.

It’s been suggested that, come the revolution, the best possible of outcomes to the question of who shall be Head of State is the man off the goggle box who for innumerable aeons has been telling us about the birds and the bees, the silverbacks and the dung beetles, the fishes and the flytraps. But could we not, on reflection, do a bit better than that? If God does exist he is surely the spit of David Attenborough.

You'd think a lengthy shoot on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe would be any actor's dream, but apparently Ben Miller found making Death in Paradise too hot and uncomfortable. That means he's perfectly cast as DI Richard Poole, a detective from the Metropolitan Police sent (as the drama would have it) to Saint-Marie, a fictional small island near Guadeloupe, to investigate the murder of a fellow British cop, Charlie Hulme.

What a relief: Andrew Graham-Dixon got the job of presenting this documentary on one of my favourite British 20th-century artists. If it had been Waldemar Januszczak (sometimes interesting but too gimmick-laden and shouty) or Matthew Collings (sometimes interesting but too fond of the catchy sweeping statement) I would have thought twice about tuning in. But Graham-Dixon understands that the art documentary is not about him, it’s about the artist.

And now we faced the final curtain. Spooks responded with an inspired burst of hyperactivity and plots-within-plots, and even a micro-cameo from Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Quinn, the original head of Section D. Up to now this hadn't been the finest of seasons, partly because the death of Richard Armitage's Lucas North at the end of Series 9 left a void which was never successfully filled.

At the end of the first series, we left our bedraggled band of survivors in Atlanta, their expectations dashed that they might be able to find some glimmer of hope at the Center for Disease Control. Instead, all they'd discovered was a lone, slightly deranged scientist who had failed to find a cure for the zombie plague. Then the generators ran out of fuel, fail-safe devices kicked in and the CDC blew up.

Reading the pre-transmission blurb, you might have formed the impression that Holy Flying Circus was going to offer new insights into the controversy that erupted around Monty Python's supposedly blasphemous Life of Brian movie when it was released in 1979. Instead, its 90 minutes were a thin gruel of flabby fantasy and caricature.

The scale of the operation was hard to take in, as was the extent of the cover-up. Between 1940 and 1990, it’s estimated that up to 30,000 babies were trafficked in Spain. It started under the military dictatorship of Franco, but it ended long after its fall, though why the sudden cut-off was given as 1990 we never learned. What we did learn was this: that newborn babies were systematically taken by mothers deemed to be ideologically or morally unfit, and they were often bought by couples for cash. Within hours of giving birth these mothers were told that their babies had died.

I was possibly not the right person to review this programme. I didn't do biology beyond GCSE, can't bear David Attenborough's Natural World programmes and laugh anytime someone says "homo erectus". Nevertheless, Alice Roberts, an anatomist and a woman who clearly knows all the words to "Dry Bones", made Origins of Us on BBC Two last night subtly enthralling, even if it did suffer from a certain amount of documentaryese.

I suspect writer Julian Fellowes's guilty secret is that he has an attic stuffed with novels from Mills & Boon, such are the luridly romantic plotlines and cliché-flirting characters in Downton Abbey. If you think you can see it coming, then you probably can.