Fifty-seven minutes into this hour-long programme entitled "Al Murray’s Great British War Films", our host put panellist Dan Snow on the spot and asked him to name his favourite war film. “Does it have to be British?” Snow wondered. For a second it looked like Murray and his other two guests might stick him in solitary confinement for a week, yet Snow’s dizzy reaction was not only (unintentionally) funny but also gave away just how much he’d switched off by now. And he wouldn’t have been alone.

Kate Bush’s return to live performance next week, after 35 years’ absence, has been one of the defining features of this musical year. Her announcement, in March, of the Hammersmith gigs left even David Bowie’s gifted coup in the shade, creating a simmering summer of speculation. It’s surprising, then, that it’s taken the media so long to create the inevitable previews and retrospectives. This BBC Four feature did a bit of both, though it ended with a sense that Bush’s reputation survived the hour despite, rather than because of, the programme’s organisation.  

If, like me, you switched this on feeling sheepish about your sketchy knowledge of Chinese art, you would have welcomed as a ready-made excuse the news that some monuments synonymous with Chinese culture are relatively recent discoveries. It seems unthinkable that the terracotta army guarding the burial site of China’s first Emperor Qin Shi Huang was the stuff of legend and rumour until 1974, but it turns out that much of the 22-square-mile area occupied by the memorial is still to be explored and it could be another century before the site is fully excavated.

The fall of super-cyclist Lance Armstrong is a subject fit for Euripides or Shakespeare. It has also worked pretty well for director Alex Holmes, who managed to round up virtually all the key players caught in Armstrong's vortex of deceit for this unflaggingly gripping documentary [****].

Before the Vikings came to Britain there was no whaling, though coastal-dwellers would avail themselves of any beached strays by chopping them up for their meat and oil. It was the bellicose Norsemen who imported the notion of actively pursuing the creatures, which is how the pilot whale hunt became a tradition in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides. A line of boats would drive the whales into the shallows, where they were slaughtered by the islanders.

EM Forster fans will straight away get the reference in the quiz show's title to Howards End. Those of a less literary bent will make another mental link – Connect Four, a game for six-year-olds and up invented in 1974 and still going strong – which shares with its near-namesake the need for abstract reasoning. In fact when I first heard about Only Connect the latter was the connection I made, but it's typical of fans of the BBC show that they could make either.

“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?, marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the satirical puppet show. It certainly seemed balanced when set alongside an apoplectic Ted Heath, who accused those behind it of being, basically, a bunch of jealous, irresponsible losers.

Zany Dublin family comprising eccentric parents, neurotic daughter and dozy slacker son prepare to meet daughter's new boyfriend... Sound promising? No not especially, but The Walshes is written by Graham Linehan (with help from the "Diet of Worms" comedy troupe), and where there's Linehan there's always hope.

There really was astonishing talent on display in The Brits Who Built the Modern World (*****), as full a television panorama of the work of the five architects whose careers were under examination – Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw, Michael Hopkins and Terry Farrell – as we’re ever likely to get.

It’s a brave comic who steps into the spandex zucchini-stuffed loon pants of Spinal Tap. The – if you will – rockumentary will never be done better. But it is 30 years since Marty DiBergi went in search of the sights, the sounds, the smells of a hard-working rock band on the road. So the time is no doubt right for another set of industry jokes to be put into circulation. For the three parts of The Life of Rock, Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno should probably have their lawyers on speed dial.