Everybody knows One Thousand and One Nights, even if they don’t know they do. Ever been to the panto to see Aladdin? Watched Sinbad the Sailor on stage, or Sheherazade at the opera or ballet, or perhaps watched one the many film versions of The Thief of Baghdad? Yes to any of those and you’re a fan of possibly one of the greatest series of stories ever told.

Dan Snow's toxic trilogy climaxed in New York, where he crawled voyeuristically through the rotten core of the Big Apple. It was part Discovery Channel documentary, part Gangs of New York dirty realism, as Snow took a frankly indecent relish in regaling us with tales of death, disease and raw capitalism at its baby-eating worst.

I made the mistake of catching up with the darkly sumptuous The Crimson Petal and the White just before knuckling down to review this new two-part drama, and it was like moving from fine vintage wine to warm supermarket-brand lager. To begin with, I couldn’t dissociate Ashley Jensen from her perky but dim character in Extras, so the moment she found herself confronted with a game-show-from-hell scenario of committing a murder in return for five million quid, I expected Ricky Gervais to pop up in the next scene, giving her wisecrack-littered advice on what to do next.

Captain Scott's doomed 1910-1913 expedition to the South Pole has become one of the enduring myths of the later British Empire, a paradigm of pluck, grit and a refusal to surrender in the teeth of hideous odds. Subsequently, some historical revisionists have reached a different conclusion, that Scott was in fact an ill-prepared amateur who committed a string of fatal errors.

So Monroe reached the end of series one, and I still couldn't read what its tone was supposed to be. Some artsdesk readers have expressed enthusiasm for the theme tune, but I find its jogging Celtic jauntiness symptomatic of Monroe's wider problems. Obviously you can't expect too much from a bit of title music,  but surely it should give you a clue as to whether the show is a hard-hitting drama about life and death or a sitcom?

I prefer "living room", but I have a friend who insists on "lounge". For some reason that probably goes deep into the psyche, I cringe at "sitting room". Same goes for "front room". As for "reception room", I’ve only ever seen that in the windows of estate agents. "Parlour", too, is a rarity, confined now to TV period dramas, which is exactly where "drawing room" seems to be heading (or perhaps I’m not mixing in the right circles). And anyone who calls it a "dining room" should surely be consigned to lonely TV dinners in perpetuity.

The talent show search - not for another star but for another field to devour - has reached its logical conclusion. Whereas most such shows - The X Factor, for example - are ostensibly about one skill or another as a pretext for marketing, Britain's Next Big Thing last night on BBC Two was a talent show about finding a merchandising opportunity. Artisans were given the chance to pitch their products to major chains, and the first episode was set at Liberty (not Libertys, as most called it).

In 2004 Michael Collins wrote a fascinating book, The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class. It was part memoir of his south-London childhood, part history of the area and part polemic. Two-thirds was an excellent read, a thoroughly researched and well-written account of the many generations of his family who had lived in Walworth, but the last third was a confused mess of an argument about what he saw as the plight of the modern-day white working class - marginalised and despised by the middle-class media and forgotten by the establishment. I had a similar response to this programme; it was meticulously researched and engagingly presented, but had at its heart a deeply flawed conclusion.

Read Adam Sweeting's review of "Intelligent Design", the last-ever episode of Lewis