Inventive stop-motion animator and puppet maker who garnered a worldwide reputation

Kihachiro Kawamoto, who has died aged 85, was best known in Japan for creating the vast array of puppets populating the live-action historical television series Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1982-84) and Tale of Heike (1993-95). He was also highly regarded internationally for haunting stop-motion animations, such as Dojoji Temple (1976) and House of Flame (1979), in which the figures are manipulated and photographed frame-by-frame so that they appear to move on their own.

Like his one-time collaborator Tadanari Okamoto, with whom he toured his independent films from 1972 to 1980, his exercises in stop-motion puppetry were influenced by European practices. But Kawamoto's ornate works are also deeply rooted in Japanese folklore and aesthetics, with an overarching philosophy based on Buddhism. They are a powerful reminder of the more artisanal traditions within Japanese animation that are often ignored by western commentators' focus on commercial anime.

Kawamoto completed a total of 10 short works and the features Rennyo and His Mother (1981) and A Book of a Dead Person (2005), as well as overseeing the 2003 omnibus Winter Days, which brought together 35 of the world's leading independent animators, including Yuri Norstein, Alexandre Petrov, Bretislav Pojar and Koji Yamamura, to visually interpret a verse by the haiku poet Matsuo Basho.

Most of Kawamoto's animations used puppets that he created. The Demon (1973), about a terrifying encounter deep in the forest, adheres closely to the pared-down presentational style typified by bunraku puppet theatre, with its plain black backdrops and minimalist designs. House of Flame (1979), based on a Noh drama, is a stunning tale of a ghostly maiden confined within the purgatory of her earthly desires. He also experimented with collage techniques in films such as The Trip (1973), a surreal rendition of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, drawing on Buddhist concepts of suffering. In 1988, he made To Shoot Without Shooting, a co-production with Shanghai Animation Film Studio, in which an ambitious Chinese archer's quest for perfection presents an allegory for the nuclear arms race.

Born in Tokyo, Kawamoto became entranced by puppets as a youngster after being shown how to make them by his grandmother. He made figurines of popular stars of the day and staged them in dramatic tableaux. Despite being an avid movie fan, he originally had no plans to make a career out of his hobby. He was drafted after graduating in architecture from Yokohama National University in 1944, although he remained stationed in Japan for the remainder of the second world war. In 1946, after an introduction from an old school friend, he entered Toho film studios as an assistant in the art department, but lost his job in 1950 after a series of labour disputes rocked the company.

Kawamoto supported himself until 1953 by making dolls of popular western movie stars, which were photographed for the magazine Asahi Graph. This brought him to the attention of Tadasu Iizawa, a playwright and journalist who enlisted Kawamoto to provide the puppets for a series of photo storybooks for children, several of which were issued in English-language editions. "Even though these were really dolls, I call them puppets because they were actors within the books," Kawamoto said.

Under the mentorship of the veteran animator Tadahito Mochinaga, Kawamoto and Iizawa produced Japan's first stop-motion works with a series of television commercials and the critically lauded Beer, Those Were the Days…, a 12-minute colour promotional film for Asahi Breweries that was shown in cinemas in 1956. During this time, Iizawa introduced Kawamoto to the film The Emperor's Nightingale (1949), made by the Czech animator Jirí Trnka. Kawamoto was impressed by the way Trnka "was able to tell a story in a poetic style through the use of puppets".

While it kept him gainfully employed, Kawamoto soon became disillusioned with advertising work and creating puppets for children's television. He took the bold step of writing to Trnka out of the blue, inquiring about the possibility of studying at his studios in Prague to come closer to his ambition of creating more personal animations. Kawamoto was invited to spend a year at Trnka's studios in 1963. Several years after returning to Japan he completed the short film The Breaking of Branches Is Forbidden (1968). Kawamoto later revisited Trnka Studios to make Briar-Rose or The Sleeping Beauty (1990), a dark fantasy with Freudian undercurrents set in a fairytale world of castles and exuberant medieval pageants. The film evoked Trnka's works as well as the magical tales of the Brothers Grimm. In 2005, after the completion of A Book of a Dead Person, Kawamoto was honoured with a retrospective of his work at the Karlovy Vary film festival

A number of other high-profile international retrospectives have been held, including a British touring programme in 2008, which I organised. I had met Kawamoto in 2004, in the makeshift studio space donated by Tama Art University for the production of A Book of a Dead Person, on which he was then working with the university's students. I was struck by his intellectual sharpness, his generosity and the general air of tranquillity with which he went about his work. Kawamoto was the president of the Japan Animation Association from 1988 until his death. A museum in Iida, Nagano Prefecture, is devoted to his work.

• Kihachiro Kawamoto, puppet maker and animator, born 11 January 1925; died 23 August 2010

• Animation
• Animation
• Japan
• Television

Brookside and Gavin & Stacey may do more to spread local slang than social networking sites

In one school in estuary Essex in the 1980s, when you had a good time you had a "grindle", and if you had a jolly good time you had a "right ol' grindle". Yet stray outside the catchment area of the school – my old school – and no one was grindling. Some years later in the offices of a monthly magazine, anyone who was proving irritating was a "nizer". Despite nize-derived terms accounting for every fourth word uttered, it was an expression never heard beyond a work leaving do.

But last week we learned that local argot isn't staying put any more. Dialect words are spreading across the nation thanks to social networking. Dr Eric Schleef, lecturer in English Sociolinguistics at the University of Manchester, said: "Twitter, Facebook and texting all encourage speed and immediacy of understanding, meaning users type as they speak. We are all becoming exposed to words we may not have otherwise encountered."

He said that Welsh terms like "tidy" and "lush" have spread nationwide thanks to social networking, yet surely Gavin & Stacey might have helped via old-fashioned television.

In the 90s Brookside introduced the nation to Scouse and resulted in folk in Sussex paying their "leccy" bills and getting arrested by the "bizzies". Would Cockneys have described their new Nike Air Max as "mint" before Shameless? We tend only to social network with people we already know, who probably speak a bit like us. It takes television, film and literature to introduce us to new language.

Not that Dr Schleef denies the influence of television. He cites the use of "bootiful", a word not heard outside East Anglia until Bernard Matthews' turkey adverts. But I've not heard anyone say that outside a TV set, let alone East Anglia. Despite all the airtime, "bootiful", like "nize" and "grindle", didn't catch on, not because Twitter didn't exist but because they were just a bit "whack".

• Language
• Gavin and Stacey
• Television

Freed from the constraints of office, Tony Blair proved charm personified in his interview with Andrew Marr

The Tony Blair Interview with Andrew Marr | iPlayer

The Hunt for Britain's Sex Traffickers | 4OD

I Am Slave | 4OD

The smart money says we'll probably have one or two words elsewhere in the paper about Tony Blair, and that book, and his TV performance, so I'm not going to tread on the exalted brogues of those who'll be analysing the actual politics, just going to say – this was, finally, Tony Blair gone right.

It was impossible, watching The Tony Blair Interview With Andrew Marr, not to feel that this was what we'd been waiting for, for 13 years – 16, if you count the run-up to '97: to see the man behind the mask. Not exactly rightwing but no lover of the left; sharper and funnier than circumstances had ever allowed before, deeply articulate, capable, in bursts, of honesty: human and more than a little charming. It must be like those girlfriends who are convinced their men have been hiding something, either an emotional side or simply not being that into you, only to find out they were exactly right during that quick honest catch-up drink six months after the break-up: it's infuriatingly bittersweet but, by and large, welcome.

Freed from the shackles of party politics, ie having to lie all the time in the House, let alone being PM and thus having to lie even in his spare time, and three years away from the cameras, and presumably now letting himself relax a bit about looking after the family, what with the £20m, he allowed himself to be more of himself than we'd ever seen. He spoke, for instance, with a genuine half-smile, of the "creative ambiguity" needed for Northern Ireland, a phrase he could never have used at the time, and told a fine new story about Mo Mowlam and Gerry Adams. Asked by Andy Marr about his opposition to freedom of information, he stuck to his guns, even though he "must have been aware" that he would be condemned by lawyers, journalists and, in general, the left. "Oh, I'm sure. But they've got lots of reasons to be aghast at me, so…" The shrug was Gallic in its dismissiveness.

He had, basically, charisma coming out his ears, which are, admittedly, no less silly than before. By the end, he could have armpit-squelched his way through "Teddy Bears' Picnic" and made it sound like Pericles's funeral address to the Athenians. Say what you like about his legacy, although somehow I know what the "B.Liar" faction will say regardless – what bliss it must be to go through a life inured to nuance, swaddled in certainty – but what they say will never surprise me, and bits of what Mr Blair said still managed to.

Interview over, he and Marr shook hands, which felt like a nicely old-fashioned touch, although on further thought I don't know what era I'm thinking of. It made a change from Paxman's dismissive shuffling of papers or Jonathan Ross trying to grope someone on their way back to the green room. Courtesy and a wary mutual respect, and a nodding acquaintance with the concept of an open mind: that's what was old-fashioned.

Normal Terrace, Cheltenham, must never change its name, just to give the rest of us a giggle, though it's doubtless a tooth-grinding embarrassment to its teenagers who want to live in Blood Ditch or Scrofulous Alley. Much less fun, obviously, would be having to work there as an enforced prostitute.

According to The Hunt for Britain's Sex Traffickers, there are up to 4,000 illegally trafficked women at any time in Britain working in enforced prostitution, most of them from Eeastern Europe. Most have trusted a family friend, or even an online advert, hoping for more money here as even a cleaner, and found their trust viciously exploited. Passports are taken, debts invented and then reinvented with spiralling interest, and they find themselves lying on their backs or worse to make money for the gangmasters. The police have been seeking for three years to crack down not on the women, or even the punters, one of whom was treated here with faintly alarming police by-the-book courtesy ("we're all men, sir…"), but on those who have smuggled and effectively imprisoned them, and the operations in Luton and Cheltenham allowed Channel 4 in. The opener was great and woeful, if you know what I mean.

At one point the cops, star among them Andy Leigh (everything you'd want from a cop, courteous yet tenacious), were running round corners and barking into their lapels and saying everything three times – go go go, strike strike strike, wet wet wet; I may have misheard one – and they missed a Chinese woman pausing on her way past the raided flat and making an urgent mobile call. The documentary cameraman spotted it, and his reporter tentatively mentioned it to Leigh, who took them seriously and pounced pounced pounced. They were right: she was a gangmaster. This has been my dream, on those stories I've covered which the world comes to watch: to find the clue, spot the alley with the bundle of clothes, hear the telltale lie from the "family friend" which the police have missed, although my early chat in Soham town hall with the janitor, Mr Huntley, might technically count as a "missed chance": Channel 4 did it for real, well done cameraman, and the court result might lift a good few lives from misery.

There were no great shocks in this (apart from the fact that the real coppers looked so like TV coppers: the sharp silver-fox guy, the management-consultant boss in the office, the feisty blonde controller: have the redundant cast from The Bill already got jobs as real coppers?), but what was remarkable was the access Channel 4 had won. With so many police, and so much police talk, this was a little… plodding… but inordinately valuable, if rather confusing to my own mind about being a man. The venues for the sex – below a kebab shop, in a bedsit – were as "sexy" as a goat's armpits. What is it with these punters? What is it with men?

At least the prostitutes can, technically, escape, though few do. A different and even more harrowing side of modern slavery came in dramatic form, with the shocking, mesmerising I Am Slave, based, far from loosely, on a true story. It gave an unexplored new horror: the idea of being locked in a gated mansion in happy old north London. Malia, the Sudanese slave, played with award-winning tender anger by Wunmi Mosaku, did once manage to escape, having decided to disbelieve her rich Arab "owners" that her father would die if she ever dared, but couldn't get beyond the first half-mile – no passport, money, no anything, and no help – count it: none – from London. These things happen, and today I feel a weird shiver about my adopted city: far more subtle but in places equally as evil as the Khartoum-backed militia who took and sold the young Malia in the first place.

I sat once in a KLA camp inside Kosovo, Serbian shells raining down just far enough away for me to feel brave and know I could tell stories about it while not shitting myself, and watched a host of toasts being raised to Tony Blair and George Robertson for intervening: angry men with many guns had tears of gratitude as they lifted tin cups of goat-armpit raki. I sat once, too, in Darfur and wished there had been more intervention, after talking to Janjaweed rape victims and hearing of their friends who had been abducted, some of whom will have ended up exactly as Malia. It's a crying shame Blair diddled us so much at home, stuck us in a cruel domestic farce, when he's far more impassioned about global tragedy. He diddled with Ayckbourn while wanting to lunge towards Shakespeare or Beckett. Sometimes people simply find themselves in the wrong play.

• Tony Blair
• Andrew Marr
• Prostitution
• Television

The TV presenter on dealing with hairy legs again,standup comedy and her new documentary on prostitution

So tell me about the new hair...

I know. I wish I knew how it happened. I'd been using this thing that I made up with olive oil and avocado, but no one knows really. I've not been to the doctor. I only ever went once about my hair, when it fell out, and he said it was 99% certain I'd never get it back. I had alopecia universalis – ie no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. That was five years ago. But, hey, now I've got hair! Of course, it might fall out again. My friend, who has had alopecia since she was four, had her hair come back when she was 18 and then, after about six months of a cute little bob, it all fell out again. So I'm not getting my hopes up. It's been about nine months and I'm enjoying it while I can.

Are the eyelashes real?

Yes, all mine. And I've got my nose hairs back. And, look – my eyebrows have grown in a style! I've not plucked them or anything. But then there are the hairy legs and hairy underarms – I've gone swimming and suddenly thought, oh God, I'd forgotten all about that.

Has coming back from baldness involved a mental readjustment?

It makes me feel better about myself, but I'm not clinging to hope. I'd resigned myself to never having hair again, so I see it as a bonus – a luxury. And I enjoyed being bald. You could have fun with it – if I ever saw paparazzi following I would do the Vulcan sign. One time, I went out with my girlfriends and we all had wigs on that we took off and swapped round and freaked everyone out. Also, it was brilliant maintenance-wise – now it's back to shampoos and conditioners.

How has your daughter taken it?

She's great. She was a bit upset at first, because she loved the fact that Mummy was different and the kids would have great fun with my bald head – they'd rub it and make wishes. But now I think she likes my elfin-type thing. She's not sure if she wants me to have long hair, but I think that might be wishful thinking on my part anyway. I'm just going to stick with the crop at the moment. I had it cut for the first time yesterday. It was quite exciting. It's the first time I've been to the hairdressers in six years.

Stress is thought to be a trigger for alopecia. Does this mean you have a less manic life these days?

I hope so, but I like being busy. I've been doing this documentary about prostitution. It's not something I'd ever really thought about before – the women involved or why they're doing it. I spoke to one woman, who had been hit by her partner and her child was disabled. She'd got into prostitution to support the child and thought she'd get out of it but now she has a criminal record for soliciting and can't get out of it because who'll give her a job? The woman's eyes were filling with tears when I was talking to her. I felt really helpless listening to these stories. You felt the country wasn't doing enough for these women.

Have you kept in touch with any of them?

Yes. I'll be walking through Soho and it's "Hello, Monique!" I like to make friends, and they tell me all their stories over lunch. Two of them Twitter me and one of them is my friend on Facebook. She's mad as a hatter. She's great.

So it's not all misery...

A lot of the women I spoke to said they were happy doing the job. And I met a couple of apparently successful women who have a couple of clients a week because they choose to. But once you delve deeper you find problems in their past – there's never a straight story.

You've done a number of quite serious documentaries...

I did one about inter-country adoption, then another about being blind. I had to learn how to use a stick and they gave me these special glasses where I couldn't see anything. I had to find my way back from Blackpool to London. Trying to use the bathroom on a train was an absolute nightmare. And you could never get anyone to help. Some teenage girls who'd been drinking walked me into a post and ran off. I was quite tearful. I had to meet this blind guy afterwards who had lost his sight when he was 17. He told me all these stories. It was really quite emotional.

In your 2007 autobiography, you wrote about depression, self-harming and anorexia. Is it helpful to make films about people less fortunate than yourself?

I've just come back from Vietnam where I did a trek for the Children's Trust, a charity for children with brain injuries and life-threatening injuries. So it does help you put things in perspective. Some magazine, which I won't name, put me up for bravery awards. What's so brave about being bald? I've not fought for my country or found the cure for cancer – I've just gone out without my hat on! I told them to shove it up their jaxie.

You did a standup slot at the Edinburgh TV festival this year. Were you nervous?

I was, but I'd done it before. I did the Comedy Store last year and it was terrifying. I got up and just froze for about 10 seconds. I forgot everything. But then it was fine. Everyone seemed to clap – and laugh. I don't know if it was sympathy but it was great. I was sick before I went on, but it was great coming off.

Did you write your own routine for Edinburgh?

My friend Russell Kane, the comedian, has been my mentor. He's amazing. He said, draw on any problems you've had and I'm like... I've got a bagful!

Anything else in the pipeline?

There's another couple of documentaries I've been approached for. And I'm still doing things like GMTV and The Wright Stuff on Channel 5. It's like one minute I'm talking about Cheryl Cole buying a new house in America and the next minute I'll be discussing Afghanistan. I love it. When I was bald, I went through a period where I seemed to do nothing except TV programmes about being bald. So, yes, I'm happy. It's all good.

Gail Porter on Prostitution will be on Current TV on 13 September at 10pm

• Gail Porter
• Television
• Prostitution

Voyeuristic, sensationalist, revolting… Embarrassing Bodies is accused of being all of these. So why are people prepared to share their unsightly medical problems with a record-breaking TV audience?

A sweaty morning at Thorpe Park, and the smell of sunblock and ketchup hangs heavy in the air. In the shade of Saw, a freefall rollercoaster based on the torture-porn franchise, and beside a grey but warming lake, a crowd is gathering by the Embarrassing Bodies truck. For one day only, Dr Christian Jessen and Dr Dawn Harper will be consulting in the back of their well-lit van, a televised surgery open to anybody passing between rides. Provided, of course, that they're within the 70% of the population suffering from an embarrassing illness – varicose veins, excess hair, stretchmarks, alopecia, IBS, obesity. Something that oozes, preferably. Something swollen.

Rosie and Kelly are 13 years old, and so excited to be in the presence of Dr Christian that they're quivering, visibly. As fans of Embarrassing Bodies, the Channel 4 show that offers contributors lengthy medical attention in exchange for a close-up of their glittering piles, they're recalling their favourite episode from the three series so far. Was it the episode with the interior designer's oversized labia? Was it the one about the woman with the udder-like breasts? The one with Christina's anal warts? They remember all of those, but their favourite was the episode where Dr Christian stood in a locker room to compare the penis sizes of a whole rugby team. "It was brilliant," they say. "He was brilliant. I'd definitely go on the show, if I had something wrong." Then I ask Rosie and Kelly, as I will ask many people over the next few days, the question most asked about Embarrassing Bodies: if the problem embarrasses them, why do patients choose to go on telly with it? They answer, but I'll come to that.

Embarrassing Bodies, produced by Maverick TV, first appeared on Channel 4 in 2007, an explosion of incontinence and skin rashes, with Ashley Jensen's voiceover explaining the statistics around the illnesses shown. In the Evening Standard, Victor Lewis-Smith wrote that the show was "admirable, unpalatable, fascinating and repulsive in roughly equal measure". Since then it's become furiously successful, the most watched programme on Channel 4 this year, consistently winning audiences of up to four million, double the average ratings for its 9pm time slot.

The show has covered 120 different conditions to date. After last month's special episode, about a nine-year-old girl called Charlotte who visited the clinic with extreme verrucas – her feet were covered in molluscs – and was found to need a bone marrow transplant, the Anthony Nolan Trust reported a 4,000% increase in enquiries. Embarrassing Bodies's Bafta-award-winning website is responsible for 42% of Channel 4's web traffic, and its STI checker has, at last count, been used by one million people. More than 150,000 viewers took their online autism spectrum test, creating the world's largest test of its kind.

The website is also used as an example of how television is moving towards a "multiplatform" future – spikes in Embarrassing Bodies's web traffic during the show proved viewers are watching with their laptops open, tapping their own questions into the message boards, clicking through the "vulva gallery" or applying to be on the show. Adam Gee, cross-platform commissioning editor for factual programming at Channel 4, explains, "It was the first evidence that multiplatform for factual could work and find an audience."

Along with Drs Dawn Harper and Pixie McKenna, Dr Christian Jessen is the face of Embarrassing Bodies. The face, the arms, the muscular chest, the skin of which can often be seen peeking from a carelessly buttoned polo shirt, the colour of cured meat and the size of a healthy bottom. We meet as he comes off the rollercoaster Colossus, where he's been testing his heart rate for a piece about stress levels. He happily poses for photographs for fans and gives me an apologetic grin as he signs another autograph.

Last year Jessen hit the headlines when Gordon Brown's spin doctor, Damian McBride, sent an email to Labour blogger Derek Draper, suggesting they spread the unfounded story that David Cameron had suffered from a sexually transmitted disease. He also suggested "inserting [a] picture of Dr Christian Jessen", implying the Embarrassing Bodies doctor, also a practising Harley Street GP, had treated the now Prime Minister.

"I can't say I've never met David Cameron," Jessen said at the time, also unable to deny it. "It's interesting, because if you say, 'No, someone's not a patient', is that also a breach of confidentiality?" His main gripe with the story, he said, was the suggestion that treatment for an STI could have brought down a government. "I was particularly disappointed because there I am, slogging away, trying to make people feel more comfortable talking about these things, and then this idiot undoes it all in one email by implying it is shameful and embarrassing. It made me very cross."

Jessen is very posh, very clever and very charming. He grew up in Fulham, west London, went to boarding school and graduated from UCL in 2000, when he moved to Kenya and Uganda to research HIV and malaria in children. Now 32, he lives with his partner and miniature Pinscher in London.

When he joined the show, he didn't think it would last. "I didn't think piles and verrucas would be exciting to a Channel 4 audience," he says, "but I soon realised that people hadn't seen the novelty of haemorrhoids before, because we're usually pretty crap about talking about this stuff. Yes it's a bit gross, but we never treat it in a sensationalistic way. It's good, practical telly, and that's why it works." I can't help but comment on his muscles. They're glinting in the sunlight, swelling like hams in my sightline. He thanks me. "I like it when people think I don't look like a doctor – that's why we were cast. We're not bow-tied, spectacled, dull. There's a need for normal-looking people in the medical profession I think, a crying need for doctors who are approachable." On screen, they're referred to as Dr Christian, Dr Dawn. "It's a very closed business, very secretive and reverential. And our harshest critics are other doctors."

Dr Dee Dawson, medical director of the Rhodes Farm eating disorder clinic, has watched Embarrassing Bodies from her London sofa. She says the show "sensationalises serious illnesses and pleases ghoulish audiences with its tabloid format". But, she continues, "in doing that, it also alerts them to potential problems, and I'm sure people are more likely to see their doctors after watching an episode relevant to them, in the same way that we saw a spike in smear tests after Jade Goody talked about her cervical cancer. It's horrendous," she says, "and so overly dramatic, but it's a positive thing, in the end. In fact, my father only had a melanoma diagnosed after watching a medical programme on TV."

Inside the Embarrassing Bodies truck, a screen separates the surgery set and a tiny waiting room, where a bowl of pink orchids erupts on the coffee table. The first patient to walk in from the park is 23-year-old Natasha, who wants to talk about irritable bowel syndrome. Her boyfriend, Peter, waits patiently by the fence. "We love the show," he tells me. "My mother died of skin cancer this year and the programme showed me the warning signs to look out for. Plus all the blokes with their tackle out – they ask questions I wouldn't dare!"

As the cameras roll, Dr Christian asks Natasha about her loose stools. "The message," he says, after a brief conversation, "is don't panic, but be insistent. Fight for help, and find a GP that will ask for more tests."

Outside in the sunshine Natasha is elated. "That was so fantastic," she says. "He gave me the confidence to go back to my doctor. And yes, it's an embarrassing problem, but when you finally talk about it you feel so much better."

Why did you decide to go on TV with it?

"Well," she says, "I love

the show. And I love that the doctors make themselves so approachable. GPs, usually, are so busy they don't have time to listen. And I honestly think the show is changing young people's views on how they communicate about their bodies."

Rosie and Kelly, still lurking for another glimpse of Dr Christian, agree. They say that their friends wouldn't laugh at them if they appeared on Embarrassing Bodies because the fact it's on TV legitimises the problem – takes the shame away.

Dr Dawn Harper, who's an NHS GP in Gloucestershire when not filming, says one of the reasons people decide to take their problems on the show is the brand recognition. "They've seen us on TV, so they trust us. Plus, there's a huge sector of society that thinks: 'If it's not life threatening, I mustn't bother my doctor', or they've felt a lack of sympathy from them in the past. And while women are always registered with the doctor for their smear test, men are often still registered at their mum's GP. Viewers feel like they know us a bit. They've seen how we interact with patients so they know what to expect. And we have support from more and more specialists as the show grows, so there's the availability of things that aren't offered on the NHS."

I hear all Harper's reasons repeated by patients as the day goes on.

Kelly Coulter, who's brought her 18-month-old son to the truckstop to talk about a problem with his gums, says she'd "absolutely get my breasts out on the show if I was guaranteed a boob job". Plastic surgery is a subject often broached in the programme. Jessen (who talked to the Daily Mail about his hair transplant in May) tells me, "I'm for plastic surgery, as long as the industry doesn't take advantage and prey on us."

One of the surgeries Jessen recommended on an episode in 2008 was a patient's labioplasty. In her book Living Dolls, Natasha Walter details how uneasy this made her feel. "[In this episode] a young woman consulted a doctor about the fact that her labia minora extended slightly beyond her labia majora and that this caused her embarrassment. Instead of reassuring her that this was entirely normal, the doctor recommended, and carried out, surgery on her labia. The comments left on the programme's website showed how this decision to carry out plastic surgery to fit a young woman's body to a so-called norm made other young women feel intensely anxious. 'I'm 15 and I thought I was fine, but since I've watched the programme I've become worried, as mine seem larger than the girl who had hers made surgically smaller! It doesn't make any difference to my life, but I worry now that when I'm older and start having sex I might have problems!' one girl said.

"This idea that there is one correct way for female genitals to look is undoubtedly tied into the rise of pornography… If the rise of pornography was really tied up with women's liberation and empowerment, it would not be increasing women's anxiety about fitting into a narrow physical ideal," wrote Walter.

I ask Jessen whether this patient's referral was a difficult decision. "It's a hugely controversial subject, but she was having dreams about cutting off her labia. To me, that justifies the treatment – she was grossly psychologically disturbed." Is he concerned that with this decision he might encourage female viewers to seek surgery when there's no medical problem? He sighs. "It's our job to show all available treatment. And if it creates a forum for girls to talk about their bodies… We try our best – there's no malice in what we do."

A few days later, in their Birmingham clinic/studio, a set lit so whitely it feels like a 1960s vision of heaven, I meet John. I'd heard about John. Once, over lunch, a friend told me about the programme she'd watched the night before. Wide-eyed, she used her hands to describe an operation they'd shown, where, in order to cure the man's perianal abscesses, they'd stretched his anus open with metal pegs, so that, square, it filled the TV screen neatly. The image stays with her still. When John, now 27, returns to Embarrassing Bodies, it's after 15 operations; he says he's feeling "the best I have in four years".

The problem began when he was 23, and a prison officer in Nottingham. One night, an inmate threw a television from the floor above – it landed inches from where John was standing and he had a panic attack. He took a week off due to stress and it was then that he noticed the first swelling. When the abscess burst inside him, it spread. The pain, he says, was like "being kicked in the spine", and once it caused him to black out. But worse than the pain, he says, was the humiliation of asking his girlfriend, who he'd met while recovering from his eighth operation, to regularly clean his seeping wounds. "He'd had to wear a nappy in his pants," Dr Pixie McKenna tells me. "It was so, so sad."

The episode of Embarrassing Bodies which concentrated on Charlotte Wilson's verrucas inspired John to seek them out – John chased their truck stops around Britain, finally getting a walk-in appointment with Dr Pixie when he'd just come off a night shift.

"I saw that they'd saved that little girl's life, so I wanted them to fight my corner," John tells me. "And I thought if they could help me out, then showing my backside on national TV would be a small price to pay." When John's episode aired, he found out later, his prison colleagues had thrown an Embarrassing Bodies party, where, during the screening of his operation, someone had thrown up on their pepperoni pizza.

Today, after shyly admitting that his girlfriend has agreed to marry him, he's happy to drop his trousers and show his scars to Dr Pixie, who gasps with pleasure. "That is not the same bottom that I first met!" she cries.

Michelle, 45, is birdlike, and woke at five to drive down from Lancaster, where she's proud to live in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. When she told her 19-year-old son she was thinking of approaching Embarrassing Bodies about her constipation after a post- hysterectomy prolapse, he said he wasn't happy about it, but that if it would help, he'd support her. Sitting in the surgery, camera angles mean she must answer Dr Pixie's question – "Do you get any soiling?" four times. Her examination is over in seconds – a rectocele is diagnosed – and the screen where I'm sitting fills with an internal HD image. "Embarrassing Bodies doesn't believe in pixilation," the executive producer, Steph Harris, tells me. "It implies shame."

I talk to Michelle over a cup of tea. "I was very apprehensive, yes," she says. She's sitting up straighter than she was before she entered the surgery – she seems to take up more space, somehow. "I was especially scared about the young cameraman, but he made me feel completely at ease. There was no pressure and lots of explanation. I'm so happy to have come."

But why choose to broadcast your problem, I ask. "I come from a nursing background and this is one of my favourite shows, so I knew I'd get an honest consultation. And if nothing else, I wanted to highlight how common this problem is to other women. I'm not the only one of my friends to watch it either – I have a friend who's in hospital today after diagnosing herself with carpal tunnel syndrome when she saw it on the programme."

For all the reviews pointing out Embarrassing Bodies's "crypto-pornographic nature", the criticism of the show's relationships with cosmetic surgeons, and the format, which relies on suspenseful ad breaks and the promise of genital close-ups, it's the patients who convince me that the programme does good, helping viewers talk about worries they'd otherwise hide.

Dr Dawn tells me about a recent event she went to with her NHS colleagues. "They tease me, of course they do, but that night 40 out of the 60 doctors there told me they'd seen patients purely off the back of the show."

Interestingly, I think this is the only show in the makeover genre to include both male and female contributors. And while the occasional woman's saggy belly is hacked away by surgeons, the overall message is one of practical medicine: less about how you feel about your body, more about the body itself. And it's the only programme on telly where the haemorrhoid's the star.

Embarrassing Bodies series four begins on C4 on 17 September. Can I Just Ask? (Hay House, £12.99) by Dr Christian Jessen, a collection of questions doctors are asked when off-duty, is published on 1 November

In the autumn of 2008, nine-year-old Charlotte Wilson's mother, Sofia, led her into Dr Christian's clinic, seeking help for her verrucas. When he saw her feet, he was briefly speechless, but viewers saw his brain whirring into action. Verrucas, a common viral infection which most people's immune systems can quickly defeat, covered her toes in a terrifying crust. Dr Christian realised that this was an indication that Charlotte's immune system was losing the battle. She was referred to Great Ormond Street Hospital where the diagnosis was confirmed. The immunologist warned that in time Charlotte would be vulnerable to life-threatening infections. She needed a bone marrow transplant. Luckily, blood tests revealed that her sister Isabelle was a perfect match. Charlotte received chemotherapy in an isolation room, and after months away from home, she celebrated her 10th birthday in hospital, waiting for the bone marrow to take root.

When the show aired, the Embarrassing Bodies website encouraged viewers to sign up for the Bone Marrow Register and the following day the Anthony Nolan Trust received 1,400 requests for information, as opposed to the usual 30. This week, the show's producer received an email from Sofia Wilson. "Charlotte looks fantastic," wrote her mother. "Lots of curly hair and a suntan... [Recovery] is going to take longer than we thought (Charlotte has to learn to stick a needle under her skin so that she can do her gamma-globulin infusion herself), but you saved our daughter's life".

• Television
• Health & wellbeing
• Channel 4
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• Medical drama

Isle of MTV | No Hats No Trainers | American Grindhouse | The Middle | Secret Britain | U Be Dead and more

Saturday 4 September

Isle Of MTV; Camp Bestival

12midday, MTV; 9pm, Sky Arts 1

Two different approaches at annual music festivals. First off, MTV take over a chunk of Malta for their big, spectacular concert. The bands picked are ones that know plenty about showmanship: Scissor Sisters, Kelis and Kid Rock. In these cash-strapped days such wilful, wasteful consumerism is a wonder to behold and it's great to see MTV actually putting some M on their TV for a change. The other side of the coin is the carbon-neutral Camp Bestival in Dorset. Audiences there, in fancy dress, witnessed an eclectic selection including Madness, Friendly Fires, the Human League and George Clinton.

No Hats No Trainers

12.25pm, BBC2

The lively No Hats No Trainers is back for a second series, and it's well worth tuning in to ease that post-Saturday Kitchen food coma along. Last time, 1Xtra's MistaJam brought the likes of N-Dubz, Big Boi, Tinie Tempah and Skepta to weekend lunchtimes, in a smart, funny and sharp approach to music TV for teenagers. This time around, expect Loick Essien and Mz Bratt, as well as countless other almost-stars who will be all over the charts in 12 months time.

Rigoletto Live From Mantua;

BBC Proms 2010

7.15pm; 9pm, BBC2

Placido Domingo has recently been garnering plaudits for his run at Covent Garden in the title role of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. This will have been, at the very least, useful practice for taking up the title role in this ambitious staging of Verdi¹s Rigoletto. Verdi originally set the opera in Mantua, and this production will bring it home, broadcasting live from different locations across the city under the supervision of Oscar-winning director Andrea Andermann. Later on BBC2, Suzy Klein introduces the second of two 2010 Proms concerts by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.

My Funniest Year: 2000

10pm, Channel 4

In a depressingly retrograde studio audience format, compere and comedian Rufus Hound does something the futurists never dreamt of – looks back with a wry, nostalgic eye to the year 2000. As clips remind us, this was the year of Big Brother's inauguration, of Geri Halliwell at the UN, of Tony Blair being booed by the Women's Institute, of the beginning of George Bush's disastrous Presidency. We could do without Hound's constant prompts as to what to find amusing in all this. Shaun Ryder, Mr 2000 himself, guests.

American Grindhouse

10.30pm, Sky Arts 1

This informative documentary charts the course of US exploitation cinema from the silent days, through the restrictive years of the Hays Code (1934-1968) where the film industry censored itself into blandness, to the wonderful 1970s where out of town drive-ins and the grindhouses of 42nd Street and Hollywood Boulevard churned out risque fare for crowds of outsiders. It takes an almost academic approach, treating the subject with the respect it deserves, showing how and why these lurid movies happened and discussing their enduring appeal with film-makers like John Landis, HG Lewis and Joe Dante.

Hancock & Joan

11pm, BBC4

Ken Stott puts in a compelling performance as Tony Hancock in this repeat of the biopic about the British comedian whose talent went alongside a monstrous ego, a raging alcoholism and a charisma that destroyed those around him. One such person was Joan Le Mesurier, wife of the actor John, who fell under Hancock 's spell and engaged in a torrid affair with him in the last year of his life. Maxine Peake is superb as Joan.

Sunday 5 September

The Middle

6.30pm, Sky1

Sky1's new show is decent enough. Patricia Heaton solid as the head of a midwest family and there's fine support from Atticus Shaffer as weirdo son Brick. (Library membership revoked, he's reduced to reading his mum's Mills & Boon: "Which part of me is my lingering manhood?") But rather than just be ordinary, like precursor Malcolm In The Middle, the whole show has to make a fuss of the fact that it's about how hard being a middle-class American is.

Mountain Gorilla

8pm, BBC2

More tales from the central African mountains – the group of Silverbacks has lost their leader and his son, Rano, is having a problem stepping into his shoes. He's finding it difficult to earn their respect and leads the group out of the park and on to farm land in search of food. Watching these amazing creatures is mesmerising but, though anthropomorphosis is probably difficult to avoid when talking about an animal so closely related to humans, the narrative does seem to make a lot of assumptions about the gorilla's personal motives and emotional states.

Secret Britain

9pm, BBC1

Concluding their journey in search of hidden corners of the British countryside, Countryfile co-presenters Matt Baker and Julia Bradbury head for the borderlands. The frequently epic landscapes they see are often portrayed as wholly wild and unspoilt, but the duo reveal how people have been leaving their mark in these regions since the Roman era. Among tonight's highlights, Matt boards a train that chuffs its way to Britain's most remote railway station and Julia heads to Glencoe to hunt for a "hidden valley that lives up to its name".

U Be Dead

9pm, ITV1

This drama is based on the true story of Dr Jan Falkowski, who along with his girlfriend was stalked incessantly by one Maria Marchese, who bombarded him with text messages sent from telephone kiosks, before fabricating a charge of rape against him. David Morrissey stars as Falkowski, for whom sympathy was mitigated when he began an affair with a younger woman in the midst of the duress. The drama benefits from being based on real life, circumventing the cliches and set pieces mainstream TV would demand.

Jersey Shore; The Hard Times Of RJ Berger

9pm; 10pm, MTV

Tonight, MTV has two new launches, each broadcast from the lowest common denominator. First up is season two of Jersey Shore, a reality show in which girls and boys from New Jersey go on a mission to find cheap spray tanning and uncomplicated sexual intercourse. The Hard Times OF RJ Berger, meanwhile, is like The Wonder Years, with added sexual content. Can RJ beat the cards nature has dealt him to hook up with Jenny Swanson? Guilty pleasures, all round.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe; Burden Of Dreams

9.50pm; 10.15pm, Sky Arts 1

Two things you need to know about director Werner Herzog: firstly, he operates on an often hard to fathom set of rules and second, he always keeps his word. You can see both of these things in these documentaries. Burden covers the making of his Fitzcarraldo, where he decided that the best way to make a film about a man having a steamship hauled over a mountain in South America was to actually go there and do it for real – take that, CGI! As for being a man of his word, well he once said that if fellow film-maker Errol Morris ever completed Gates Of Heaven he'd eat his shoe. Werner chows down at the premiere of Morris' film.

• Television

Sorry, only two cheers for Mark Thompson in his MacTaggart lecture (Report, 28 August). It is not "great that Sky is going to make the HBO archive available to British viewers": it is deplorable that Sky is deliberately going to deprive all non-Sky subscribers of HBO drama – programmes of the highest quality that they have until now been able to enjoy on free-to-air channels. This is simply a repetition in another area of broadcasting – if the word is still appropriate – of what they have done with sport, especially cricket. Mark Thompson's error is in treating Sky as if it were a natural part of the ecology of British media.

It is analogous to the grey squirrel or the American carp, unwanted incomers that have disrupted and distorted our ecology. With the assistance, of course, of thousands of subscriptions from bien pensant Guardian and Independent readers who really know better, but can't deny themselves the goodies that Rupert Murdoch dangles before them.

Robert Williams

Aberystwyth, Ceredigion

• I haven't seen a good drama – something new, something breathtaking, something that took a risk – for a long time on the BBC. I'm old enough to remember The Wednesday Play and productions like Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction, and writers like Dennis Potter and directors like Ken Loach. EastEnders, Holby City, Casualty, Waterloo Road, all currently being heavily promoted, are not dramas in this sense. My brain starts to scream after five seconds of any of them. Don't the government cuts give the BBC an opportunity to seek out new writers and present new drama by relative unknowns. OK, some may flop, but at minimal cost compared with the knackered regulars the BBC puts out.

Peter Armitage

Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire

• BBC
• Mark Thompson
• HBO
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• US television industry
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• Television
• BSkyB
• Rupert Murdoch

'She barges through the Dalai Lama's security gates, trampling over the toothless old ladies'

As a boy, when I didn't want to finish my tea I was made to sit at the table until every last scrap of stone-cold brussels sprouts was gone from my plate. My dad would give graphic lectures about starving African children and how I should be grateful for the pan of scouse my mother had reheated. Sometimes he'd go and get the John Pilger book about Vietnam and make me look at photos of napalmed children so my anguish could be put into context in the grand scale of human suffering.

At first glance, Channel 4's new series My Family's Crazy Gap Year (Mon, 9pm, Channel 4) is based on some of the same principles as my boyhood teatime psychological warfare. At the beginning of part one, a very well-off mum with a six-bedroom house in the Home Counties announces she's taking hubby and three young children into the most remote, poverty-stricken areas of the world to make them grateful for all the lovely things they have at home.

It gets better when you find out that she's refusing to get them immunised in favour of homeopathic remedies, despite the plan to go and live in a malaria-filled jungle – which they're planning to do for a whole YEAR!

"It's like the people who do their weekly shopping at Whole Foods Market get mixed up in Cannibal Holocaust or something," I told one of my friends before I'd actually watched the whole thing.

But then I watched it, and my excitement turned all floppy. They start their trip by flying business class to Ladakh, near Tibet, where – as luck may have it – the Dalai Lama is visiting. Prudent timing for Buddhist-convert Mum whose desperation to get a private audience with his Holiness turns her into a woman possessed.

She barges through the Dalai Lama's security gates, trampling over the toothless old ladies who've trekked for months on hobbled feet with three-legged donkeys over rickety rope bridges so they can get to see their whole reason for existence (a baldy man wearing shades, who's much more comfortable sitting in Sharon Stone's Jacuzzi while her butler writes him a cheque for a million dollars so he can continue his fight to make the world less materialistic). When the family finally meet the Dalai Lama, Dad starts crying while offering to help him out with all the amazingly important work he's doing in the world, such as being interviewed by David Frost every so often.

With Mum's spiritual autograph book duly signed, the family fly off to go and live with some yak farmers. We discover amazing things about their culture like how they have to crap in a hole in the ground; how they make their own booze because there are no off-licences; and why they yank the still-beating hearts out of living sheep before pulling the stomachs out in the living room, splattering the terrified British children in gore.

You can predict the mother coming out with the line, "We did this to teach the children where their meat actually comes from", before it comes out of her lips; that's because killing an animal on camera for reasons of human self-awareness has become obligatory in documentaries like this since 2004.

And then it's off to visit "the remote, undiscovered tribe in the Amazon who've never seen a western family before", despite their campsite being right next to the river. Amazingly, they're super friendly to the family, as are all "lost tribes" to western film crews, chiefly because they've usually been paid the equivalent of five years' wages by a fixer.

"They are the kindest people I have ever met," says Dad, as the chief of the tribe shoots a lizard out of a tree, skins it and serves it up for dinner while their six-year-old daughter walks around topless, a mass of mosquito bites.

"We've got an awful lot to learn from them," he observes sagely between munches of reptile. The sum of his insight being: "Everybody is the same wherever you go."

Really, Dad? Really? Is that all you've got? Have you never been to Burnley?

• Television

Mad Men is steamrollering back on to our screens for a fourth series. Missed the last 39 episodes? Let Pete Cashmore get you up to speed

What? Three series in 500 words? You've got to be kidding! Oh Christ, OK …

So there's this guy played by The Missing Dog Guy from 30 Rock and he works in an ad agency in the 1950s or 1960s – when pomade was popular, basically – when he's not cheating on his wife and stealing the identity of a Korean war hero.

He gets a new secretary who has a thing with the American bloke from that rubbish BBC2 adaptation Of Money by Martin Amis, who doesn't like Missing Dog Guy.

Oh, and Rubbish Adaptation Man is also married. There seems to be a lot of whiskey being drunk, and fags smoked.

In the fullness of time, Missing Dog Guy's being found out to not be the man who he says he is and everybody starts thinking that his secretary is actually some kind of lady advertising genius; the Kennedy presidential campaign starts and the bloke who basically owns the company has a heart attack.

Kennedy gets elected, because this is real, not some weird alternative reality shit like Watchmen.

Throughout it all, there's this redhead lass in it who some MP wants all women nowadays to look like.

Anyway, we get to the end of series one and Rubbish Amis Bloke is clearly trying to supplant Missing Dog Guy, who seems to be going a bit mad.

Then series two starts and things get more confusing because, although they are all basically winning accounts or losing accounts and going out for dinner and womanising, there are more people, some of whom are alcoholics and some of whom are not.

Missing Dog Guy gets his shit together at around the time that Rubbish Amis Bloke starts losing it, and all of a sudden Former Secretary Genius Woman is now the dominant figure in the office, except that nobody is paying attention because of the Cuban missile crisis.

By the end of series two, everybody, even Missing Dog's normally faithful wife, is shagging somebody else.

How many words left? 90? OK, focus, focus.

An English ad agency buys the American ad agency and by now, the Secretary Genius is smoking pot.

Missing Dog's wife has a baby but that doesn't save their marriage.

Further historical allusions are crowbarred into proceedings. Missing Dog and his wife get back together and then they both have affairs again.

Then his secret identity is revealed!

Then Kennedy gets shot!

Then the company is sold – again!

Then Missing Dog Bloke and his wife get divorced!

Then he takes over the company! Then it's now! Any the wiser? No!

Give me a whiskey and a smoke and LEAVE ME ALONE!

Mad Men, Wednesday, 10pm, BBC4

Malcolm X's Assassination

This series begins on Thanksgiving 1964 and Malcolm X was murdered in Manhattan in Feb 1965. Let's hope Pete and his trusty rifle (as witnessed in Series 1) are above suspicion.

Vietnam War

The first US troops head to Vietnam to fight in the decade's defining conflict in March 1965. Will Joan's army doctor husband Greg join them?

The Beatles play Shea Stadium

New York. August 1965. In episode two of this series Don buys Sally some Beatles 45s. Will Don get one up on Betty – as Weekend Dad – and take his daughter to the 55,000-capacity scream fest?

The UK bans TV ads for cigarettes

Will the news from August 1965 cause Roger Sterling more heart trouble wondering if the same thing might happen in the US?

The Guide

• Television
• Mad Men
• Drama

"No shake – not even one whipped up by Bod's amphibian support act Alberto Frog – is delicious enough to replace a meal"

Much like when the official organ of the Soviet Communist party was called Pravda, meaning "truth", you have to appreciate the black humour in an ad giving itself the same name. Slim-Fast's 3-2-1 Truth campaign features a series of stand-up comics talking about diets we can safely assume they've never been on. "So I go to this weight-loss counsellor," says one, "and she says, 'Where would you like to be in six months?'" But our budget-brand Sarah Silverman is trying not to hear this: "Six months? I need to be in a pink bridesmaid's dress in one month; I just need to be able to zip it up!" As her audience laughs politely in search of a punchline we segue to the science bit where we're introduced to the "clinically proven" and "ridiculously simple" Slim-Fast 3-2-1 Plan, a series of meal bars, delicious shakes and tiny portions that offers a crash diet for pie-faces everywhere in time for their summer whatevers.

Slim-Fast's whole premise has always been preposterous. No shake – not even one whipped up by Bod's lactose-loving amphibian support act Alberto Frog – is delicious enough to replace a meal. Likewise, there's no such thing as a "meal bar" unless you could fashion a pot roast, yorkshire puddings, parsnips, potatoes and peas into bar form and then pour gravy over it. There's no escaping the fundamentally ascetic nature of calorie-controlled dieting; if you really care so little for your emotional wellbeing then surely the time-honoured method of ingesting 400 laxatives and running on the spot in a boilersuit is the way to go. Because it's going to be a long old summer if you think a meal shake brings all the boys to the yard.

See the ad here

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Well, if it worked for Benedict Cumberbatch, who is to say it won't work for the rest of us: the Sherlock look is here to stay (for a while)

One of the differences between US and British detective dramas is that the latter never influence men's fashion. No sooner had the opening credits rolled on the first episode of Miami Vice than the nation's suburban lotharios hastened as one to Burton's as if to prove that a pastel jacket and slip-on loafers looked every bit as striking on a portly middle-aged man in the Arndale Centre as they did on Don Johnson cruising down Ocean Drive, just in a very different way. Nothing equivalent happened with Bergerac or A Touch Of Frost. Somehow the nation's suburban loatharios seem capable of sitting through Midsomer Murders (an impressive feat of endurance in itself) without rushing to Burton's for the full DCI Barnaby.

So it's testament to the impact of the BBC's Sherlock that, before the series had even ended, Belstaff was forced to put the wool trench coat worn by Benedict Cumberbatch back into production. Presumably enquiries slowed when it turned out said coat cost £1,350, but you can see why men wanted to get the look. Perhaps they noted the effect Cumberbatch, by no means your standard telly hunk, had on lady viewers ("He looks like Sid The Sloth from Ice Age – but in a hot way," gasped one female friend), and decided it must have something to do with the clobber. So it is that Britain's latest men's style icon is a fictional asexual sociopath first seen onscreen hitting a corpse with a stick. Surely not even the great detective himself could have deduced that was going to happen.

• Alexis wears coat, £605, by D&G, from Harvey Nichols. Trousers, £95, and scarf, £39, both by Reiss. Shoes, from a selection, by Fins. Photograph: David Newby for the Guardian. Styling: Aradia Crockett. Grooming: Nikki Palmer at Mandy Coakley.

• Sherlock
• Benedict Cumberbatch
• Men's coats
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• BBC
• Men's fashion
• Fashion

Beating the stars of Mad Men to an Emmy for her role in The Good Wife was a 'well-received shock', British actor Archie Panjabi says

When Hugh Laurie went home from last Sunday's Emmy awards empty handed, there seemed to be a mass slumping of shoulders among the British press. Laurie has found spectacular success with his portrayal of a grumpy doctor in the TV drama House, but perhaps it's time for him to let another – younger, better-looking – Brit steal the spotlight in America. She may not yet be a household name in Britain, but Archie Panjabi is a big deal in America; the 38-year-old from Edgware, London, picked up her first Emmy on Sunday.

Panjabi's dazzling portrayal of a law firm's in-house private investigator in the hit CBS show The Good Wife swept aside Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss and Christina Hendricks, who were surely odds-on to win. Even with months of wildly supportive press in the US, did Panjabi have a clue that she would win best supporting actress in a drama series? She roars with laughter. "No! It was a complete shock. I was up against five very talented and established actresses ... but it was a well-received shock. The best way to describe it is to compare it to a child's first trip to Disneyland."

Panjabi was asked to audition for the show after the writers saw her performances in the films A Mighty Heart and A Good Year – Ridley Scott, director of the latter, was an executive producer. There's even a quote from him on her website, saying that she is "smart and sensitive enough as an actress to make anything fly, comedy or drama, an unusual talent ... she's a beautiful girl".

The great thing about Panjabi is that she doesn't rely on her considerable beauty. She can do comedy – she had fun with roles in East is East and Bend It Like Beckham - but is a serious character actor. She is able to lose herself in different roles yet is always commanding on screen - even alongside Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart. In the critically acclaimed 2004 film Yasmin, in which she played a bold, modern young woman who agrees to enter into an arranged marriage to please her traditional Pakistani family and whose world is rocked by 9/11, she gave her character dignity, depth and a very real sense of suppressed anger.

The role of Kalinda in The Good Wife is perfect for Panjabi: she is totally fearless in her figure-hugging clothes, stiletto boots and soft, expensive leather jackets. She wears her hair up, stands very straight and scares most of the people who come into contact with her. She is contained, emotionally remote and sexually ambiguous.

How did the writers first describe Kalinda? "As an East Indian – which is what Americans say to differentiate from American Indian – Erin Brockovich who uses her sexuality to get what she wants. In the pilot I wore jeans and then came the high boots. The costume designer had this idea of making her wear tight clothes and really short skirts. We were trying to make her look sexy without it being obvious she'd made a big effort. It was a challenge, but we got there in the end. I love roles where I have to transform myself."

Panjabi enjoys the spiky boots; they help her get into character, get her walking in a totally different way. Off screen, Panjabi is a little shy and learning slowly to shed her British modesty whereas Kalinda is feisty as hell. But there's a steeliness and a determination to succeed that they share. When I ask if she is ambitious, Panjabi repeats the question to herself. "I knew what I wanted to do for my entire life, from nursery to university. I've always been geared towards wanting to act. I've stuck with it, dedicated time to it. So if that makes me ambitious, then the answer is yes."

Her parents emigrated to London from India before she was born and in previous interviews she has mentioned family arguments about acting; as Yasmin compromises by agreeing to an arranged marriage, so Panjabi agreed to study management studies at Brunel before pursuing acting full-time. If anything, having to fight for her freedom to act has given her focus. She worked so hard on the first series of The Good Wife that she barely managed to do any sightseeing in New York (where the drama is filmed because Julianna Margulies, as the wife of Chris Noth's disgraced politician, wanted to stay close to home).

Panjabi thinks nothing of waking up at 2am and doing some work on her character but dismisses suggestions of being a workaholic; she insists extra-curricular research helps her to relax. She hasn't even had time to watch Mad Men, Nurse Jackie, 30 Rock, Modern Family or any of the other American TV shows of the last few years. These shows, great though they are, tend to be dominated by white faces and I wonder if Panjabi has ever felt thwarted by her ethnicity. "Sometimes my ethnicity is relevant, other times not. I definitely get the best of both worlds. The great thing about Kalinda is that her ambiguous sexuality is more important than her background."

There are times when Panjabi desperately misses family and friends in London, but she is committed to staying in New York until April, when series two of The Good Wife finishes filming. And what then? "I honestly don't know. I'd love to work with Ken Loach and maybe even Quentin Tarantino." As one of his tough chicks? She laughs. "Yeah! Please! I'd love to do a romantic comedy. And perhaps, if the character was right and I had a good gut instinct, a Bollywood movie." The words are now tumbling out. "And I'd love to direct. One day. I'm learning a lot on the set of The Good Wife."

So, apart from being totally focused on her work and, it's probably fair to say, consumed by Kalinda, what makes Panjabi so good at her job? "Oh no! I'm too British to tell you that. Maybe it's always telling myself that I can do better. Remembering never to learn lines and then just recite them. Thank you for thinking I'm good." She tails off, embarrassed.

• Emmy awards
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• United States

Lucy Mangan on the people in the spotlight in the last seven days, whether they wanted to be or not

Spot of bother

Pakistan cricket

Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone and let us all bow our heads and mourn the death of innocence.

Three members of the Pakistan cricket team, including captain Salman Butt, star teenage bowler Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif became the subject of some scrutiny by Scotland Yard and the sport's authorities after allegations that the three delivered deliberate no-balls in return for cash – spot-betting – as part of an international betting racket allegedly run by Mazhar Majeed, agent to several of Pakistan's players. They have now been suspended by the International Cricket Council and charged under its anti-corruption code.

Rumours that behind Majeed is the ultimate evil mastermind, The Lady Who Threw the Cat in the Bin Last Week, remain unconfirmed at time of going to press.

Helmet off

The Stig

The Man in the White Helmet was revealed this week as someone whom we already knew him to be thanks to earlier reports about who he was and a book about his life that he had written for HarperCollins.

The BBC applied for a high court injunction against its publication on the grounds that the Beeb made The Stig what he is today – an enigmatic but vital part of one of BBC Worldwide's most valuable brands, Top Gear. In what the publisher called a "victory for free speech" – a claim that would ring less hollow if the publisher weren't a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation – the injunction was denied. So who is The Stig? We wouldn't dream of spoiling the fun. Except that if we don't you might buy the book. So it's a guy called Ben Collins.

Top hop

Kate Moss

It's been a beautiful – and, like all the best relationships, lucrative – thing, but it's over. The teeny-tiny pocket person (she's like a model model) and Sir Philip Green, Topshop owner, have parted business ways.

Over the last four years Moss has designed a fantastically successful range of clothing for gazelle-thighed adolescent freaks of nature whose clear-eyed, glossy-haired beauty and epidermal firmness makes you weep with joy and fury. But the termination of her contract was announced this week. Maybe the collections weren't selling as well as before, maybe the Moss gloss had passed its shiniest peak, but the news also coincides with Green's 19-year-old daughter, Chloe, coming to work at the family firm. Does she have a covetous eye on the dream designing job in high street fashion? Probably. Do we care? Probably not. Do we still want to cry, now that we've started? Definitely, yes

"They are trying to portray it as a classic big money move to ITV, when nothing could be further from the truth."

Presenter Adrian Chiles claims he wasn't so much running towards a £6m contract as running away from sharing The One Show duties with Chris Evans.

"Cotswold airport."

The new council sign that has gone up on the A429. It's showing the way to Cotswold airport. You probably got that.

"I look forward to the day when Tony says he's a Milibandite rather than people asking me if I'm a Blairite."

David Miliband has a long-term vision.

• Heinz tomato soup is 100 years old this week

• More than half of 65- to 74-year-olds are online

• We each have 3lbs of bacteria living in our guts

• 1,500 people a day are hospitalised through drinking

• 80% of mothers lie to their children about food to get them to eat healthily

• August was the coldest for 17 years

• Whether Paul McKenna really is going to buy Michael Jackson's £19m mansion

• Pakistan cricket betting scandal
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In Who Do You Think You Were, firefighter Neil Clarke discovers that in a past life he was a land-owning, murdering widower – or was he?

Trevor Roberts is "a hypnotist with a speciality in past life regression" according to the careful voiceover by film-maker Pinny Grylls for her documentary Who Do You Think You Were. Indeed. By their overly white, overly pressed shirts, soothing tones and indefinable air of creepiness shall ye know them.

Neil Clarke, a 32-year-old firefighter from Stoke-on-Trent, volunteered to undergo past life regression to see who he had been in a previous incarnation. Traditionally, of course, it's Marie Antoinette, who must have had souls rattling round in her like distressed aristocrats in a tumbrel. Clarke rang the changes by recovering memories of being a 19th-century Glossop landowner called Peter John Hawksworth, who lost his wife then his money and then murdered one of his debt collectors.

"What are you taking from this life?" asked Trevor (soothingly) at the end of their session. "Heartache," Clarke replied.

Unsettled by but also convinced of the truth of his experience, Clarke set out – with the help of his wife, the internet, a genealogist called Dee and his father Phil – to see if a formerly land-owning, widowed murderer by that name had ever existed in the wilds of Gloucestershire.

It transpired that he had not. But what also transpired was that Clarke's mother had died when he was 16. Father and son had barely talked about it since. Evidently, what we take from a lot of lives is heartache.

This was a revelation that came too late to be fully explored, which made the programme feel oddly weighted. The mysteries of the myriad ways in which the mind will try to cope with unresolved traumas, the need we have for constructing narratives to help us make sense of our lives, were evoked but not delved into. Unlike most documentaries dealing with such subjects, though, Grylls mercifully resisted the temptation to leave us with an ending that suggested "maybe there's something in it after all!"

"That's a big pile of shit," said Clarke as he skirted a field. "It's a metaphor for this documentary!" But it wasn't, at all.

• Television
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Join us on Monday morning as Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley take to the Daybreak sofas for the first time …

Set your alarms now – Monday brings a media event to top all others. Beside this even Jason Manford and Alex Jones making their debut on The One Show pales into insignficance. Because come 6am on Monday morning, Christine Bleakley and Adrian Chiles will be reunited on the sofa once more.

It will of course be a different sofa, on a different channel. But no matter – Daybreak will surely still feature slightly odd magaziney items, strange links and the old Bleakley/Chiles chemistry. What more could you want very first thing in the morning?

If actually, you want the comfort of your bed a little more than breakfast TV, we luckily have all bases covered. I'll be posting updates and thoughts throughout the show on Monday morning - watching so you don't have to. And if you do find yourself in front of the telly celebrating Daybreak's debut? Do drop in and join me. There's two-and-a-half hours of Chiles and Bleakley to get through …

• GMTV
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• ITV
• Adrian Chiles

Crumbling flats provided gritty, urban backdrop for Clint Eastwood film and TV shows including The Bill and Spooks

Later this year when bulldozers begin to raze the sprawling Heygate housing estate in south London, few will mourn. The occasional remaining fan of early 70s Soviet-style brutalism may do so, perhaps, along with ex-residents who remember a thriving community amid the concrete towers and walkways. But their regret will be shared by another, more unlikely group: film and TV directors.

Over the past few years, the long-unloved sprawl of vast, mid-height blocks of flats, fringed by scruffy communal spaces has gained a new lease of life as one of the UK's most popular, if unlikely, filming locations. Since 2007, almost two shoots a month have taken place on the Heygate. The few remaining residents bumped into the likes of Clint Eastwood and Michael Caine, not to mention cast and crew members from TV series including Spooks, Hustle, Silent Witness and – on a near-weekly basis, according to locals – The Bill.

Over this period the combined filming fees for the estate have earned the local council, Southwark, more than £90,000, all of which is reinvested in community projects.

Film-makers are drawn to the Heygate for two reasons. The severe lines of the rectangular blocks of flats, edged in crumbling, concrete balconies, are telegenic shorthand for gritty, urban life. Additionally, the protracted redevelopment of the wider Elephant and Castle area has left the estate intact, despite being almost emptied of people. From a peak of about 700 residents, only about 50 remain.

"It's a huge advantage," said Andrew Pavord from Southwark's film office, which liaises with film and TV crews and arranges permits. He recalls a three-month shoot earlier this year for Attack the Block, a British-made comedy about a group of teenagers battling alien invaders. "This was mainly night shoots, with lots of special effects," said Walker. We were able to make sure they stayed in parts of the estate where people wouldn't be disturbed. It wouldn't have worked anywhere else."

The Heygate has hosted a "huge range" of productions in recent years, from major films and TV series, to pop videos and student productions, Pavord said. "We're a bit sad right now, as the latest X-Men film was thinking about filming on the Heygate, but now they're not. They wanted somewhere to look like 1960s New York. Bring in a few yellow taxis and it would have done the trick."

Another major recent shoot saw Caine return to his south London roots to make Harry Brown, a drama about a widower who takes on local drug gangs. Late last year, Clint Eastwood spent time on the estate, directing scenes for his upcoming thriller, Hereafter. ITV police series The Bill was at the Heygate "more or less constantly" until its recent demise, according to Pavord. Producers used it as one of several stand-ins for the programme's fictional Larkhall estate.

Completed in 1974, the Heygate's generously sized flats were initially popular with council tenants, but the estate gradually struggled with a reputation for violence and deprivation.

One of the curiosities of its recent renaissance is that with real crime declining as the estate emptied, it was sometimes the fictional version which caused concern. In July, police were called when hundreds of bullet casings were found on the Heygate. They turned out to be blanks fired for a scene in The Veteran, starring British actor Brian Cox. A similar false alarm occurred when locals were spooked by a fake riot staged for gang-related drama, Shank.

According to Chris Michaelides, former head of the Heygate's now-dissolved tenants and residents association, film-makers have done all they can to keep locals happy, offering financial compensation or alternative accommodation during night shoots, or employing them as extras.

"Before most people left we'd get a percentage of the filming fees. We'd use it to take the local kids to Legoland, or go to the seaside," Michaelides said.

Filming was also only permitted if the estate was not identified, Pavord added: "It can only be a backdrop, they can't call it the Heygate. By letting people film here, at least we have some measure of control. We turned down one film about drugs and they just used another estate somewhere else and called it the Heygate."

Overall, he said, the Heygate's new-found fame was a boon: "If you bump into a huge film crew every time you leave the house it can get a bit galling. But it works both ways. Everyone was very excited to have Clint Eastwood on the estate."

• Housing
• Communities
• London
• The Bill
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• Clint Eastwood
• Film industry

Despite her moments of jaw-dropping oddness, Radio 2 will be poorer for Sarah Kennedy's departure

Sarah Kennedy to leave BBC Radio 2

And so, members of the Dawn Patrol have lost their leader. After 17 years in the early morning slot on Radio 2 – a presenting stint which earned her a Sony Gold in 1995 – Sarah Kennedy is to leave Radio 2.

Her departure, announced suddenly today, is in some senses no surprise at all. When Chris Evans replaced Wogan in January, Kennedy was allotted an extra half-hour each day, but her show was also moved back an hour to a 5am start. Given that she often mentioned getting up at 3.30am to start work at 6am, and the early starts were referenced whenever her behaviour on air was a cause for concern, offence, guffaws or jaw-dropping moments of disbelief, it never seemed likely she would flourish for long at the earlier hour.

In recent years Kennedy has also been that nightmare prospect for station bosses: a loose cannon, but one who remained popular. On too many mornings, her show sounded all at sea – most notoriously in 2007 when she seemed to slur her words and stumble over phrases, referring to Princess Diana in a "pinka polka blot" dress, and suggesting that the victim of the Phil Spector murder trial had died from a gunshot wound to the "month". Kennedy bumbled her way through casually racist remarks, too, describing how in the dark she nearly ran over a black man dressed in black, and suggesting that black people make good athletes because they were historically good at running away from lions.

Those were the headline-grabbing moments, but every show had its eccentric, shambolic interludes, some of them enough to prompt listeners into double-takes. One of the most memorable was her decision to dedicate Susan Boyle's version of Cry Me a River to flood-stricken Cumbrians, as if they might need some more water. For all the warmth with which she greeted her audience and their correspondence, she often appeared to speak without any real sense that people were listening – particularly not the station management.

And yet, for all the times you wish she'd thought before speaking, there was something magnificent about Kennedy's show. It was, on the many good days, defiantly odd: presented with a rambling, freewheeling spirit you might associate with a clever aunt who's just spent a bit too long indoors with her cats. She might repeat a tale or two (her experience of the tarmac of an Egyptian airport was a favourite); she might read out a long letter about chicken feed and then reach for a show tune; she might turn to the Daily Mail more than you'd like, but Kennedy was also quite unlike anyone else.

Inevitably, this made more sense as a prelude to Wogan's surreal musings than it did to Evans's controlled mayhem, and Kennedy's show has seemed ever more out of kilter as radio has grown more homogenous, dull and cautious. I'll miss Kennedy for being herself – even if that sometimes made for wince-inducing radio – and for sometimes running amok with much style. I loved her outburst in which she called a vicar an "old prune", Ken Bruce an "old fool", and the head of Radio 4 a "gob on a stick". I also enjoyed the venom with which she more recently set about correcting Zoë Ball on-air, when Ball had opined it might be nice to get "a lass" (whoever could Ball have had in mind, I wonder?) on Radio 2 in the daytime.

For that's the other loss here, at the end of a radio career which deserved a warm on-air send off, for her audience as much as Kennedy herself: Radio 2, the country's most popular station, now has no regular female presenter on daytime weekdays. That, like this all-too muted departure after such long service to the station, is a shame.

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• Sarah Kennedy
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Malfunctioning communication systems, self-indulgence, witless interviews – mornings just won't be the same without GMTV

GMTV: a history in pictures

"I'm ending on a high – well, except for the hurricane." And so it was, with typical clunkiness and unashamed clumsiness, that GMTV's weathergirl Clare bid her adieu on the last ever episode of the morning news programme, happy to end on good weather (save for Hurricane Earl in the US).

With the kind of linguistic poeticism for which this show has always been known ("It's important to remember at times like this, that 'Diana' backwards is 'an aid'" – ah, Fiona Phillips, the mornings just haven't been the same since you left), it was an apt summation of the final show itself.

Presenters Andrew Castle and Emma Crosby dealt with the unpleasantness of the show's replacement with a new version fronted by BBC imports Christine Bleakley and Adrian Chiles with the kind of bland inoffensiveness for which they are known.

Lo, every time Andrew and Emma did what is known on TV as "the paper review" (which, in the context of GMTV, would probably be more accurate to call the "hold up some of the Daily Mail animal stories to the camera and coo appreciatively" segment) there was a massive photo of Christine Bleakley staring out of the front page of the Guardian – with the lemon-juice-in-paper-cut headline: "Back with Adrian at last!".

But Castle is a professional (tennis player) and focused nobly on that other media furore story on the Guardian's front page, the News of the World phone hacking scandal, which he was allowed to tut his disapproval of. He wasn't allowed to do much else. It wasn't until 8:45am that there was any acknowledgement that this was the last show. Perhaps Andrew just couldn't hold back the emotion anymore upon the arrival of the show's star guests ... McFly. "It's the last show so we're a bit sad," said Andrew to the band, averting his eyes from all the hair gel and tattoos. "But we're very glad you're here!" chirruped Emma. Andrew remained schtum.

By 9:20, the self-indulgence came to the fore, with a song by Castle's daughter, the whole crew on the sofa and then a muted "That's pretty much it from GMTV", from Castle.

As a final show, it wasn't a classic. (Even GMTV stalwarts might struggle with the repeated interview with a woman who recovered from cervical cancer, although to GMTV the main story was that she lost a lot of weight to boot. Cancer! Even better than the Blood Group Diet!) Yet all the traditional features were on show: link-ups that didn't work, communication systems malfunctioning, Dr Hilary losing his interest in proceedings as quickly as he is losing his hair.

And the competitions! Quizzes that seem to have been composed by the recently lobotomised. Even in its dying throes, GMTV manfully maintained the tradition: "Complete the following phrase: Come rain or a) shine b) twinkle or c) glow."

Yet the Fall of the House of GMTV saddens me enormously. I have loved it with the unabashedness of an aged rock star's adoration of an 18-year-old groupie: yes, it's stupid and yes, I should know better. While UK television feels increasingly glossy and Americanised, GMTV has always remained impervious. Where else could Penny Smith have been the newscaster? Or someone like Fiona Phillips – who once comforted Gerry and Kate McCann by pointing out, "There are light moments, though. You've acquired this odd celebrity status" – been one of the main anchors? Those were GMTV's glory days.

But from Monday GMTV will be replaced by Daybreak, hosted by Christine Bleakley and Adrian Chiles. Quite why Bleakley and Chiles are seen as such a winning duo baffles and depresses me – suggesting, as it does, that the ideal TV schtick still consists of an overly made-up woman, a schlubby man and a suggestion of an implausible frisson between them. It's like watching a Judd Apatow film, without the comedy.

Leaving aside quality concerns, however, (we are talking about ITV's morning schedule) it's the money that changes things. Chiles and Bleakley have combined contracts worth, we are told, £10m. But a high salary rarely guarantees that a presenter will be anything approaching fun – or even watchable. Instead they often become boring egomaniacs, a non-gap in the TV market already amply filled.

No more will we have Ben Shephard unable to suppress his clear irritation with Fiona Phillips - the 21st century version of the Eamonn Holmes and Anthea Turner pairing from the early days of GMTV. Instead, it's manufactured flirtation between Chiles and Bleakley, winking at each other for their suppers. GMTV: we had no idea what you were on about some mornings (particularly when Fiona was still there), but you will be missed.

• GMTV
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• Television industry
• ITV
• The news on TV

From its visceral, shocking opener to the final, rhapsodic payoff, Lost pulls you in so completely that you soon stop noticing how crazy it all is

From its brilliantly choreographed opening – a plane crashing onto a deserted beach, a survivor opening an eye, another being sucked into a screeching engine – to the final, rhapsodic payoff, Lost is a rollercoaster. The story pulls you along at such a pace you soon stop noticing how crazy it all is, and simply surrender to its logic.

Polar bears in the tropics? Sure! A monster made of smoke? Why not? Secret hatches buried in the jungle? Hey, what's inside? An electromagnetic machine that could blow up the world? Disarm it! It's all part of a staggeringly original tapestry blending elements from classic old cliffhangers with the cult weirdness of Twin Peaks, and the emotional punch of relationship-dramas like Six Feet Under.

The passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 have no idea where they've crashed, and neither does anyone else. Through poignant flashbacks, we discover how adrift they were in their pre-island lives, too: Jack, a doctor with father issues; Kate, a killer on the run; Sawyer, a conman fleeing his past. It's a clever device that allows us to leave the lush island, even when the characters can't.

One of the main criticisms levelled at Lost, as it aired on Sky, was that the writers seemed to be making it up as they went along, taking viewers down rabbitholes willy-nilly. The complete box set, out this month, lets you see that there was method in the madness, a path towards the ending, albeit a tortuous one. And if you don't like one storyline, don't worry: seven more will soon be coming along.

Lost grows from its Lord of the Flies roots into an epic story that wrestles with fate, belief, science, friendship and love – while taking in pirates, time travel, genocide, and the occasional game of golf. It's a tribute to its storytelling that one of the most exciting moments in the whole show comes when a light is simply switched on. The light is seen through a window in the hatch. Instantly, we understand its meaning: the crash survivors are not alone on the island.

• Television
• Lost

As a snapshot of 1984, Real Crime was great – but its supposed revelations were hardly new

There was something defiantly old-school about Real Crime: Yvonne Fletcher (ITV1): the unnecessary reconstruction featuring an Yvonne Fletcher lookalike who didn't look anything like Yvonne Fletcher; the newsreel footage of the British ambassador's wife singing the national anthem at Tripoli airport; Leon Brittan looking and sounding every bit as smarmy now as he did when he was home secretary in 1984.

As a recreation of a time when Libya was considered a major threat, Real Crime worked well. But it wasn't a period pastiche; it was a documentary about the shooting of Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy while policing an anti-Gaddafi demonstration. And here it rather came apart, not so much in the retelling of the events leading up to her death and its aftermath, as in presenter Mark Austin's insistence that it was telling us something new.

According to Austin, the existence of a secret document that says two Libyan embassy workers, Muhammad Matuq and Abdulgader Baghdadi, could be prosecuted for conspiracy to murder is a major new development. Not to the rest of us, it isn't. Within days of the subsequent embassy siege ending with all Libyan personnel being granted safe passage back to Tripoli, it was an open secret that Matuq and Baghdadi were the most likely suspects.

It was also an open secret there was absolutely no chance of either man ever being tried as they both had close links to Gaddafi, and the UK government was never going to rock the boat. The best Fletcher's family were ever going to get was the £250,000 blood money the Libyan government handed over as a tacit admission of guilt.

I can understand the frustration of Fletcher's family and friends, given that her alleged killers now have top jobs in the Libyan government; but including personal pieces to camera from former colleagues ("She has been denied justice") and an SAS man ("We should have gone in there and killed the lot of them") is neither enlightening nor helpful. If the programme really wanted to explain the reasons for the absence of a trial, it could have gone a great deal deeper into the complex diplomatic and trade links between Libya and the UK; and to mention the Lockerbie bombing without adding that there are strong doubts about Libya and Megrahi's involvement was a serious miss. Still, I guess that doesn't count as Real Crime.

Meanwhile, Dr Alice Roberts was continuing to do her bit for making archaeology sexy in Digging for Britain (BBC2). And very good she is at it, too. Here she revealed rather more about the dark ages than Mark Austin managed to about an event that happened 1,600 years later: how Britain was a multicultural nation centuries before anyone had invented the word; how, far from being merely a bloodthirsty mob of shaggers and killers, the Anglo-Saxons looked after disabled members of their society; how you can't necessarily trust theologians, such as the Venerable Bede, to give you an unbiased view of a society's history. It always helps to have a presenter – unlike Austin – who knows precisely where the bodies are buried.

New comedy quiz shows always make me nervous. Principally because they are rarely funny. Or a quiz, for that matter. The King is Dead (BBC3) didn't let me down. Here's the deal. Each week Simon Bird, Nick Mohammed and Katy Wix – all of whom have previously been known to be funny – pretend that someone important has died and interview minor celebs for the job vacancy. For this opening show, it was the president of the US, and in the running were Sarah Beeny – who spent the whole show looking like she wanted to kill her agent for putting her up for it, James Corden, who would turn up for anything providing there was a camera running, and Peaches Geldof. Yup, Peaches Geldof. If she's a guest on your first show, you know the game is up.

If there were any moments of comedy, I managed to miss them. I could say it was a show aimed at 14-year-old boys. But my 14-year-old son came in and watched with me for 10 minutes before saying: "Jesus, Dad. You don't half have to watch some shite."

• Television