Before Banksy's work became the object of desire for champagne-sipping, canapé-snaffling hedge fund managers at auction houses' private views, there was something of the curled lip about street art. Indeed, for years it wasn't known as street art but graffiti - the painted defacement of walls. London in the Noughties saw the evolution of that view: there could be a legitimate artistic value of this sort of work. However, not all graffiti qualified - much was still mindless vandalism.

On 5 August last year, a cave-in at Chile's 121-year-old San José copper mine left 33 workers trapped more than 2,000ft underground. Their subterranean ordeal would last 69 days, but this documentary concerned itself with the first 17 of those, the period during which the miners had no contact with anybody on the surface and had no way of knowing if they'd be rescued.

Your typical consumer of Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC One would almost certainly have been disappointed by last night's first instalment of the eighth series. There were no tears from June Brown, EastEnders' Dot Cotton, for a start. That is as it should be: what we got was a model of keen yet detached historical research, nothing from which Brown was going to take life-changing lessons, which is how facile this series can be.

Twenty-four years ago, I found myself hanging out virtually every day in the Henry Horner Homes, a Chicago housing project on the city's hardscrabble West Side. I had begun to immerse myself in the lives of two young brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, in an effort to understand what it means to be growing up poor in the world's wealthiest nation. Mother Teresa had visited this neighbourhood just a few years earlier, and what so struck her was not the poverty of the pocketbook - she had certainly seen worse in India - but rather what she called “the poverty of the spirit”. Indeed, it was a dispiriting place - especially the shootings which had become such a regular occurrence that the kids knew the drill: crouch in their windowless hallway of their apartment until the gunfire stopped - and count to make sure everyone was there.

Life is full of aphorisms ascribing properties to particular colours. The scarlet woman. Red light spells danger. Yet, according to the first in the new series of Horizon, colour is “one of nature’s great illusions”. Even so, wearing red reduces stress and increases confidence. This examination of how colour is seen and interpreted, and how it affects us, revealed that an awful lot of science bods are bothered about how and why we see what we see.

Think what you will about Switzerland and the Swiss – calm, ordered country, treasured environment, cautious, democratically precise people – but look behind the scenes and things can seem quite scary. Vol spécial (Special Flight), by Swiss-French-speaking Fernand Melgar, is one of the most intense documentaries I have ever seen. Depicting asylum seekers in a detention centre, it is a vibrant portrait of human (entirely male) endeavour warping into despair under an unkind but, as the Swiss see it, necessary law of repatriation: in 1994, they voted for what is known as the federal law on coercive measures. Few citizens today know about it.

Elbowings, buttings, anklings, maimings, studdings, anarcho-thespian handbaggings – the figure formerly known as the man in black is the thin line between the beautiful game and the collapse of civilised society as we know it. And what is his reward? Players abuse him. Crowds bay for his blood. Presidents call for his execution (Polish ones do anyway).

I Resign. It’s not a phrase you hear that often these days. Unlike, obviously, You’re Fired. There was a time, largely synonymous with the era when Tory toffs and grandees had sufficient private income to walk away from employment, that a chap could afford to resign, as the phrase has it, with honour.

Is there a place for the travelling fun fair any more? Static attractions like Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have rides that are bigger, grander, more varied and scarier than anything a traditional, transient fair could ever transport. All the Fun of the Fair’s answer was that the fair has survived by winding the clock back, rekindling the past with original Victorian and Edwardian rides. There’s still room for something less bombastic.

The only voice recording Sigmund Freud ever made was for the BBC. It was made in December 1938, at Freud’s West Hampstead home just a few months before the father of psychoanalysis succumbed to throat cancer. He was 82 and wouldn’t see out another year, yet here he was on fighting form: “People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury,” he declaims, his voice clipped, precise and resoundingly emphatic. “Resistance was strong and unrelenting. The struggle is not yet over."