He’s been in the presence of murderers, rapists and paedophiles. He’s auditioned naked for a porn movie and submitted his tender midriff to liposuction. He’s spent more time than can be good for anyone in the company of Mr and Mrs Christina Hamilton. Yet it was only last night that, for the first time ever, audiences glimpsed Louis Theroux in a state of unvarnished terror. And fair play, he wasn’t afraid to show it.

Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Czech Suite, Two Slavonic Dances Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)

It’s been suggested that, come the revolution, the best possible of outcomes to the question of who shall be Head of State is the man off the goggle box who for innumerable aeons has been telling us about the birds and the bees, the silverbacks and the dung beetles, the fishes and the flytraps. But could we not, on reflection, do a bit better than that? If God does exist he is surely the spit of David Attenborough.

What a relief: Andrew Graham-Dixon got the job of presenting this documentary on one of my favourite British 20th-century artists. If it had been Waldemar Januszczak (sometimes interesting but too gimmick-laden and shouty) or Matthew Collings (sometimes interesting but too fond of the catchy sweeping statement) I would have thought twice about tuning in. But Graham-Dixon understands that the art documentary is not about him, it’s about the artist.

Maybe it’s a quirk of night-filming that the minister’s eyes look blood-red. But the earth in the Democratic Republic of Congo is Martian too, especially near the hell-hole where many of the minerals that power our mobile phones and laptops are mined. Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen enters that hole, motivated it seems by unusually visceral guilt that, even in liberal Scandinavia, casually used electronic paraphernalia is linked to terrible crimes.

The scale of the operation was hard to take in, as was the extent of the cover-up. Between 1940 and 1990, it’s estimated that up to 30,000 babies were trafficked in Spain. It started under the military dictatorship of Franco, but it ended long after its fall, though why the sudden cut-off was given as 1990 we never learned. What we did learn was this: that newborn babies were systematically taken by mothers deemed to be ideologically or morally unfit, and they were often bought by couples for cash. Within hours of giving birth these mothers were told that their babies had died.

I was possibly not the right person to review this programme. I didn't do biology beyond GCSE, can't bear David Attenborough's Natural World programmes and laugh anytime someone says "homo erectus". Nevertheless, Alice Roberts, an anatomist and a woman who clearly knows all the words to "Dry Bones", made Origins of Us on BBC Two last night subtly enthralling, even if it did suffer from a certain amount of documentaryese.

My relationship with the artist Brian Clarke, the subject of my forthcoming film, goes back a long way: when I first filmed him for a documentary I made for BBC Two in 1993 - a film about windows as symbols and metaphors in the series The Architecture of the Imagination - I was not only struck by the outstanding quality of his work as a painter and stained-glass artist, but by the exceptionally articulate and perceptive way in which he talked about art.

A movie about advertising and product placement entirely paid for by advertising and product placement? It's a Koh-i-Noor diamond of a concept, and zealous documentarian Morgan Spurlock has applied himself to his task with the efficiency of a Dyson vacuum cleaner and the tenacity of a corporate Salesman of the Month.

Good cinema can show us the unimaginable, the unknowable. As does Werner Herzog’s documentary, taking us deep into the Chauvet Caves in the Ardèche in southern France. Discovered in 1994, they contain the oldest known cave paintings. Created 32,000 years ago, they were preserved after a fortuitous rock fall sealed the cave’s original entrance.