Five Daughters is “based on the personal testimony of those most closely involved”: family, friends, the last people to see the women alive. What we are watching - the story of the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich - has the stamp of truth. When one girl missed her appointment at the methadone clinic, her mother tried to collect her prescription for her. The mother, played by Sarah Lancashire with the washed-out complexion of the terminally worried parent, would in effect have been a script consultant.

Bearing in mind this had been cobbled together in the two weeks since Malcolm McLaren’s death, and was fronted by the ubiquitous Alan Yentob, it could have been a dog’s breakfast of a programme. But it did manage to pinpoint various elements about Malcolm rather accurately, for those of us lucky enough to know him. One aspect which came through was his rather child-like quality. Probably the best story about him that his assistant for many years Sarah Bolton told me at a dinner after his funeral last week was how Malcolm was a huge fan of The Sooty Show – whenever it came on, work would stop and they would quite often find themselves rolling on the floor in hysterics.

Bearing in mind this had been cobbled together in the two weeks since Malcolm McLaren’s death, and was fronted by the ubiquitous Alan Yentob, it could have been a dog’s breakfast of a programme. But it did manage to pinpoint various elements about Malcolm rather accurately, for those of us lucky enough to know him. One aspect which came through was his rather child-like quality. Probably the best story about him that his assistant for many years Sarah Bolton told me at a dinner after his funeral last week was how Malcolm was a huge fan of The Sooty Show – whenever it came on, work would stop and they would quite often find themselves rolling on the floor in hysterics.

"The ultimate battle! Jesus versus Magneto!" raved one sci-fi blogger (ironically), on seeing that this Anglo-American remake of The Prisoner stars Jim The Passion of the Christ Caviezel and Sir Ian X-Men McKellen. If only. Unfortunately the new Prisoner's dominant characteristics are its sluggish tempo, limited vision and inability to drag itself out of the shadow of the Patrick McGoohan original.

The way the pundits were jumping up and down hailing a historic night in British politics, you'd think nobody had ever seen Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown on TV before. This, we were told, could be a historic 90 minutes that would transform our nation's political discourse. "The leaders' debate will be a direct confrontation with the voters that could change the election", according to a man wearing glasses in The Times.

When it first aired in 2007, Outnumbered finally allowed viewers to see children on television really being children (hitting each other, lying, being naturally witty, shouting “Dad attacked that lady” in public), while ruthlessly exploiting the child’s unerring ability to say aloud what we’re really thinking, whether it's about terrorism (“What other religions have blown up planes, Mummy?”) or other cultural hot potatoes.

At around the same time that Oliver Postgate, that singular genius of children’s television, was knocking up new worlds in his garden shed in Kent, so, in a garden shed in Wiltshire another remarkable maverick, Professor James Lovelock, was assembling a new world of his own. Postgate’s was a moon inhabited by Clangers, while Lovelock’s was a re-imagining of Earth as “Gaia” - and what is perhaps unexpected is that it is children’s entertainer Postgate who comes across as the more melancholy of the two men.