Is scatophilia on the loose at the BBC? After The Secret Life of Rubbish, billed as "a view of the history of modern Britain - from the back end where the rubbish comes out", creatively programmed with a repeat of The Toilet: An Unspoken History on the same night, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Both reach, so to speak, the parts that most other television documentaries don’t.

Isn’t the title a misnomer? Who Do You Think You Are? is the genealogical branch of the celebrity industry. It’s not really about who the subjects think they are: it’s who we think they are that counts. Inspecting the family trees of slebz is another way of confirming they are just like us. It’s the same as gawping at stars’ big bums in bikinis lovingly featured in the online Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame. Only nicer.

So, how are we all feeling about David Starkey? The historian’s reputation has taken a battering lately, since he was seen last year taunting overweight schoolchildren on Jamie’s Dream School and more recently causing Twitter to combust after criticising black culture on Newsnight. But if Channel 4 is to be believed, such displays of bullying and bigotry haven’t dented his authority as a historian.

Ooh look, she’s at it again. Fresh from hurling insults at David Starkey (well, he started it) and provoking the ire of historian Alison Light - who presumably didn’t make it through BBC casting - for daring to try on a bonnet on the box and thus “cheapening history”, Dr Lucy Worsley is back on our screens, doing ninja kicks in Puritan dress, trying Restoration gowns for size and shamelessly discussing Samuel Pepys’s “emissions”.

You might have wondered if, when Armenia was offered King John as part of the Globe to Globe season, they felt they’d drawn the short straw. Not a bit of it. Shakespeare’s early history play, the action of which pre-dates those for which he is better known by a century, may be rarely performed, but here, in what I suspect is a judiciously trimmed version, it brings out so much that genuinely crosses international lines, speaking Shakespeare’s story with the local accent of the producing nation.

Unlike the National, the RSC has not had a good record of producing exciting new plays in the past 20 years or so. But one exception to this rule is the theatre’s support for the work of David Edgar, whose masterpiece Pentecost was put on by them in 1994.

Immediately before Edgar Reitz (pictured below) made Heimat - the 52-hour film sequence begun in 1984 telling 20^th-century German history in profound provincial detail - he was washed up, a New German cinema revolutionary who was no longer new, outpaced by Wenders, Herzog and Fassbinder.

“It's about as close to a spiritual awakening as I’ve had in my entire life,” said Lionel Richie. He was standing close to the unmarked grave of his great-grandfather, in the pauper’s section of an overgrown Chattanooga cemetery. Richie began the search for the man he’d discovered was called John Louis Brown thinking he was on the trail of a scoundrel. He ended it discovering Brown was a former slave who had become a pioneer of the American civil rights movement. Throughout the programme, Richie wasn’t given to emotional displays and wasn’t verbose.

“Throughout our history, women and power have made an uneasy combination." Dr Helen Castor made it clear the path to power depended on more than the right alliances, lineage, and marriage partner. Even if all those were spot on, being female was enough to halt any rise. The series began with the medieval Queens Matilda and her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Aquitaine. Both wanted to rule, not reign like Queen Elizabeth II.