Question. How do you kill off a TV character whom, just a few episodes ago, you and your fellow scriptwriters went out of your way to render immortal? How… and why? Over two short seasons and one Christmas special, the writers of the BAFTA-winning Misfits (Best Drama Series 2010), marshalled by Howard Overden, have proved themselves singularly adept at coming up with plot devices that justify, narrative-wise, well, pretty much anything, and thereby leave the field wide open for their surrealist brand of comic pikey super-heroism.

Declaring that “everything in the world exists to end up on a postcard” is pretty courageous. But after watching the charming, gently funny Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley you begin thinking that maybe, just maybe, everything was created to be depicted on a piece of card destined to be sent through the post. Holiday camps, motorways, hills, walls - all were created to become images printed on the postcards collected by deltiologists like Ronnie Barker and Michael Winner.

One didn’t keep a detailed log on the state of decomposition of each and every corpse in all umpteen series of Waking the Dead. Being cold cases, they were none of them too presentable. But did any make quite such a mess as ep one of The Body Farm, which took care to begin last night with a bang? To be more forensic, an explosion distributed blood and gristle evenly around a high-rise flat, leaving not much in the way of too too solid flesh. Or as Dr Eve Lockhart put it, “a carpet of decomposing carrion covering walls, floor and ceiling”.

Why did I dislike this programme so much? At first I put it down to the stinker of a hangover I found myself watching it through. Perhaps it was the thought that my hangover would have been easier to bear under a yolk-yellow Dordogne sun than under a glowering grey London sky, and therefore the British couples featured here who’ve made just that move caused a twinge of jealousy. But they weren’t bad company given that - on the basis of the title - I’d expected Little England to focus on the ruddy-faced lager lout variety of the Englishman abroad.

Over the course of the past weekend, not to mention over the last 10 years, it has been said often enough that there are no words to express the horror of 11 September, 2001. This hasn’t stopped people from trying, of course – and sometimes with commendable results. But basically there just isn’t much effective vocabulary when it comes to describing grief and torment on a grand scale: hence, perhaps, America’s seeming lack of closure regarding the whole episode, and the often slightly surreal and distant nature of 9/11 documentaries.

After the first two parts of Mark Cousins’s magisterial The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s fair to call the presenter a generalist. He has already managed to piece together details from the cinema cultures of almost every film-making nation on earth with the authority of a specialist – and that’s before his narrative has formally progressed beyond the arrival of the talkies, let alone colour.

A couple of summers back, I spent an entire term with an idling history teacher who watched, in his many, many free periods, the entire back catalogue of QI on his laptop. And gave us running updates. Much as we mocked him for his pseudo-intellectual thumb-twiddling, in a staff room full of chat about timetables, syllabuses and the iniquities of the tuck shop, the regular injection of dorky trivia – and the entrenched and bitter arguments it provoked – was very welcome.

Scientists, eh? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them: they cure life-threatening diseases and they threaten life with ever more powerful weapons. And in the instance of this documentary, they state the bloody obvious and then go to elaborate lengths to prove that their statements of the bloody obvious are objectively correct.

It seems unlikely that the founding fathers of social media had in mind a revolution of any greater magnitude than turning your teenager’s bedroom walls inside out and making themselves rich in the process. Still, here we are, less than a decade later, reeling from a series of very literal revolutions which have, over the past nine months, upheaved a vast tract of the Arab world and recalibrated the definition of people power. Revolutions which, the BBC now claims, were catalysed and facilitated by Facebook.

Appropriate Adult began with a series of jumpy scenes mapping the bustling domestic landscape of trainee social worker Janet Leach. It was as though we were being offered one last hit of the oxygen of conventional family life (though not, we later learned, one without its own troubles) before we descended into the dead, airless realm of peepholes, incest and floodlit excavations for bones and buried nightmares.