In the course of his decade-long career Jason Manford has benefited from the British public’s appetite (eagerly fed by television producers) for inoffensive and family-friendly comics. Similar stand-ups, for instance Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay, have even become millionaires by providing this kind of comedy, and until recently there was no reason to believe that Manford was going to do anything other than follow in their footsteps, particularly after he was made co-host of BBC One’s The One Show, which regularly pulls in more than four million viewers. Television exposure like that, as any comic will tell you, means you start playing stadium gigs sooner rather than later.

The sense of crisis gathering over Spook Central in the last few episodes finally burst through this season finale like a Krakatoa-style cataclysm. Any lingering hopes that Richard Armitage’s Lucas North – the man we now know was really John Bateman – wasn’t really a black-hearted killer were brutally dashed. There was no more wriggle room. Bateman was bad to the bone.

The American networks have so far been able to resist the stick-insectish charms of David Tennant, but the BBC would probably start up a new channel just for him if he asked them. In this new four-parter, his comeback appearance after handing over the keys of the TARDIS to Matt Smith, Tennant plays Dave Tyler, a successful Glasgow photographer married to teaching assistant Rita (Laura Fraser).

As any successful entrepreneur will tell you, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” - so the sixth series of both these shows returned with just a few cosmetic changes. The muted opening is in tune with the times, Sir Alan Sugar is now the more ennobled Lord Sugar, the wonderful Margaret Mountford (who has gone back to her papyrology PhD) has been replaced in aide-de-camp duties by businesswoman and West Ham Football Cub executive Karren Brady, and Adrian Chiles (recently departed to ITV) by comic Dara Ó Briain. But in style, format and, most importantly, bombastic cliché by the 16 hopefuls jostling to become Sugar’s new sidekick, these two programmes remain the same. And what an utter joy both still are.

Looks like being a chilly autumn in Spooks world. In time-honoured fashion, the new series waved goodbye to another former stalwart with the funeral of Ros Myers (Hermione Norris), blown to bits in the last series and thus freed up to splash about in the moral squalor of ITV1's new Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Amusingly, that put her just a click of the remote control away in the same Monday, 9pm time slot. Can't say I'll miss Ros's stone face and rather lacklustre Terminator impersonations, but new addition Beth Bailey (Sophia Myles) looks poised to bring a refreshingly brash self-confidence to the party.

Part 2 @bbcproms. The madness begins. Ms Derham has not switched gowns in the interval. No sign of Titchmarsh, for which we must give thanks.

The "traditional" necklace of laurels for Sir Henry Wood's bust. Wonder if he'd welcome his head being polished by a pink rag.

How do they pick these pieces? Apols but the Marche joyeuse did not fill this tweeter with joy. On the other hand, here's Renée plus a mike.

Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now the heroically worldly Sunday Morning Live. General Synod noticed it earlier this year when complaints were made about the lack of religious programming. And the secular society noticed it when they rushed to the Beeb’s defence commending its secular and rationalist output.

New viewers begin here: even if you know nothing of the previous five series of Waterloo Road, you could start to enjoy the drama set in a failing comprehensive in Greater Manchester with the opener to series six, as the writers have rather winningly taken the precaution of barely mentioning anything that went on in previous years - not even the teen suicide pact that ended series five.

Words such as horror, grotesque, shocking and bizarre are fired at us before the title has even appeared on screen: clearly this documentary is set on living down to its sensationalist title. One bleak sunless day in May 2008, Swedish twins Sabina and Ursula Eriksson ran into traffic on the M6. Both miraculously escaped with their lives but then turned on the police officers trying to help them. With a lack of subtlety and restraint typical of this kind of schedule-filler, director Jim Nally shows us the footage of Sabina being thrown off the bonnet of a car at least twice more, slowing it down, freeze-framing it, and then just flashing up fragments of it - hammering home the kind of imagery which will have stuck in the mind of any sensitive viewer anyway.

We know we’re in cut-price Sex and the City territory when it’s not iPhones that are getting top product placement billing but Clearblue pregnancy tests. A box was held aloft between the trembling fingers of Jess as the camera slowly caressed its glistening cellophane surface for a lingering close-up.