A third series for Kay Mellor’s rags-to-riches series can herald few real surprises. We know, roughly speaking, what we’ll be getting: a cautionary tale – be careful what you wish for – populated by warm, well-drawn and big-hearted characters who are believably flawed and hiding secrets of the sort that fill the time and mouths of garden fence gossips across the country. That, and the reliable, solid ensemble cast that Mellor’s track record (Band of Gold, Fat Friends, In the Club) can command.

If it’s about magic, and features sanitised cobbled streets and dark gothic interiors, then Harry Potter comparisons will no doubt be inevitable.

It is perhaps a clever piece of ironic perversity to have scheduled the first part of a three-part documentary on sharks on polling day, but the subject here is the comings and goings inside the complex world of the predators of the sea. The series is an amazing feat on the part of the BBC Natural History Unit, in tandem with the Discovery Channel.

Peter Kay's first sitcom in 10 years is always something to look forward to, and it achieves another first: the BBC made the six-parter available on iPlayer to watch in its entirety before showing it on a terrestrial channel, and it has broken all viewing records.

The past is a foreign country. Celebrities do things differently there. Programmes which put people in time machines and whizz them back to a less centrally heated era have been around for a while. Back in the day they’d pick on ordinary people and make them live as a skivs and drudges in some specifically benighted era before the invention of such new-fangled concepts as electricity or the flush mechanism or gender equality. But that was then. Reality in the jungle has turned us all into schadenfreude addicts, so now we get the same idea but with famous faces.

There was a distinct lack of giraffe or spiny ant-eater or even ant in The Ark. The animals went in none by none in the BBC’s visit to the Old Testament. When the deluge finally came on, it was only the human race which was saved from the watery wrath of God. Our furry and feathered friends never got the call. They say don’t work with animals, but this was taking liberties with holy writ.

Screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst has some stellar credits on his CV (Shameless, Exile and The Street among others), though I don't know if Ordinary Lies is going to rate among his finest achievements. Over six episodes, the series will tell the stories of six employees of a car showroom, JS Motor Group Ltd (seemingly somewhere in the north-west), and how being frugal with the actualité blights their lives.

Hooray! The BBC has learned its lesson from the "Mumblegate" furore that erupted around last year's adaptation of Jamaica Inn, and ensured that even the most unwashed and toothless Cornish yokel in this all-new Poldark is almost 90 per cent intelligible. As the central character Ross Poldark, Aidan Turner (of Hobbit fame) is a model of robust actorly diction. 

The broomsticks are back in the cupboard, wands are no longer at the ready, and no one is casting spells in cod Latin. JK Rowling’s first novel for adults has made its inevitable journey from page to screen. The first view of a picturesque Cotswolds village – a mannikin in erotic underwear provocatively on all fours in a shop window – says it succinctly: we’re not in Hogwarts any more.

And so, after starting life as Miranda Hart's Joke Shop on Radio 4 in 2008, then continuing for three series on the BBC from 2009, Miranda is no more. Its co-creator, co-writer and star, Miranda Hart, has decided to pull the plug on her eponymously named sitcom.