James Nesbitt has always looked full of himself and too bumptious for comfort, so who better to play a smart-arse neurosurgeon who prides himself on his rock-steady hands and steely nerves? "What really matters is how well you handle losing," he bragged to his attending team of young doctors as they gathered round the latest sawn-open skull, delivering the line with the air of a riverboat gambler striking a match on the sole of his boot.

If you know which side your bread is buttered on, you should be up in arms about the white fluffy stuff you’ve been hoodwinked into putting into your toaster, implied a positively evangelical Michel Roux Jr in this first of a five-part series on the state of the nation’s food. Real bread is something that requires love, time, kneading, and more time, and more kneading. Supermarket bread is a cad and an impostor borne of sinister shortcuts in the process of making it, and the unholy use of countless scary additives and evil preservatives.

You thought Black Swan was a nightmare depiction of the ballet world? Now watch Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With English National Ballet, Part 1 and squirm. Compare Natalie Portman’s tormenting balletmaster with ENB’s Derek Deane, as each of them stages Swan Lake. One tells his ballerina she’ll need to masturbate to discover her inner black swan; the other one contemptuously dismisses his ballerina as too old, too knackered, past hope.

With no less ambition or arrogance than you would expect, the H-bomb known as Niall Ferguson (where H stands for historian) reappeared on our screens last night. From just the title, you can read the swagger: he is trying to chuck Kenneth Clark's revered Civilisation out of the pantheon. Instead of the austere aristocrat, we have the arriviste academic.

With no less ambition or arrogance than you would expect, the H-bomb known as Niall Ferguson (where H stands for historian) reappeared on our screens last night. From just the title, you can read the swagger: he is trying to chuck Kenneth Clark's revered Civilisation out of the pantheon. Instead of the austere aristocrat, we have the arriviste academic.

Unlike Sue Perkins, I’ve never sat on the Booker Prize judging panel. So I’ve never had the dubious pleasure of wading through 130-plus contemporary “literary” novels, of supremely variable quality, in a supremely short space of time (it’s approximately a novel a day, I’ve heard, given the allocated time). But still, I was left somewhat puzzled by the Culture Show special, The Books We Really Read, because Perkins – who was a Booker Prize judge in 2009 and is yet to recover from the experience – comes to a conclusion I found slightly odd.

And so television plunges deeper and deeper into the interior of The Land Beyond Monkey Tennis. The brave new world of utter desperation imagined in Alan Partridge’s litany of last-ditch TV pitches – which also, lest we forget, included Arm Wrestling with Chas & Dave, Inner-City Sumo and Cooking in Prison – has long since come to pass, but I’m not sure even Partridge would have conceived of Love Thy Neighbour.

And so television plunges deeper and deeper into the interior of The Land Beyond Monkey Tennis. The brave new world of utter desperation imagined in Alan Partridge’s litany of last-ditch TV pitches – which also, lest we forget, included Arm Wrestling with Chas & Dave, Inner-City Sumo and Cooking in Prison – has long since come to pass, but I’m not sure even Partridge would have conceived of Love Thy Neighbour.

You might justifiably argue that Jamie Oliver’s lack of academic prowess (he left school with just two GCSEs – we’re not told what in) did him no harm whatsoever. Yet he’s keen that youngsters today should be switched on to education in a way that he clearly wasn’t. So he’s recruited 20 kids to take part in Dream School – kids who, like him, all failed to attain the requisite five GCSEs at grade C and above. And he’s recruited some pretty impressive names to teach them.

For those whose only knowledge of the form is the Royal Variety Performance, this programme (part of BBC Four’s variety season) gave a nice, if all too brief, overview. The first of a two-parter was presented by Michael Grade, whose family is variety royalty - generations of Grades were performers and agents, and latterly television executives.

Meet Tom. He’s an Essex geezer with all the charm of a used toothpick, whose idea of romance is a cheeseburger on a bench in the Sainsbury’s car park. He can’t hold down a job, spends all girlfriend Cherelle’s money down the bookies, and expects her to cook, clean and run his bath – once she’s finished working two jobs of course. Enter the gum-chewing, ratings-chasing BBC Three guardian angel, ready to solve the problem in the most dramatic, exploitative and tabloid way possible. With the help of three “inspirational” female mentors, Tom must repent, change his wicked ways, and learn the secret of How To Live With Women.

Now nearing the end of its sixth series, Wild at Heart has quietly parked itself in the middle of the Sunday-evening schedules, where it goes about its task of hoovering up ratings with single-minded efficiency. Last week's debut of South Riding on BBC One was considered a triumph with 6.6 million viewers, but Wild at Heart pipped it with 6.8 million. The week before it scored over seven million.