Flogging dead Horrockses

Who do you think you are? BBC2
Pay off your mortgage in two years BBC2
Agatha Christie's Marple ITV1
Newsnight BBC2

'I feel like Miss Marple!' exclaimed Jane Horrocks during her voyage of ancestral discovery in BBC2's Who Do You Think You Are?

In the event she didn't uncover any skeletons - unless you count a black sheep of a great uncle who had emigrated to Australia and worked as an Edwardian 'Fast' Eddie Felson in the billiard halls of Queensland (about which Horrocks seemed strangely upset), not to mention a great grandmother who, after 'marrying up', proceeded to deny the existence of those siblings eschewing Methodism in favour of billiards.

As family histories go, this was pretty humdrum stuff, but somehow (and probably uniquely) this is a series that seems to thrive on humdrum. Theoretically, I don't give a stuff whether or not Ms Horrocks is distantly related to the wealthy Lancastrian mill-owning Horrockses - the self-styled 19th-century's 'greatest name in cotton' - but it was both touching and entertaining to see how much it mattered to the film's subject and her family.

It's a wildly successful format, but there's no denying there's something faintly naff about Who Do You Think You Are? I even tried to identify what this might be in list form, ending up with: 'horse-brasses, pub carveries, pebble-dash bungalows, those fake coats of arms for surnames such as Smith... genealogy almost certainly the number one internet-led suburban retirement hobby after downloading child porn?'

In my defence I'd just heard on the radio a set of statistics from BT about the sharp rise in the numbers of people attempting to access child-porn websites, and wasn't attempting to make any kind of causal link between amateur genealogists and vile scum with an unhealthy interest in children.

Anyway, WDYTYA? works engagingly well and it can't just be because we get to see inside a lot of trim bungalows belonging to a celebrity's ageing relatives.

It also makes me want to hunt for some black sheep of my own. I don't mind confessing to being both well-informed and interested in the (doubtless horrible, but intriguingly so) side of my family who founded banks and acquired Australian land by the tens of thousands of acres in the early 19th century (they eventually lost it all, of course), and a great deal less interested in the side that has spent most of the last 1,000 years fishing off the Moray Firth.

But by celebrating the relatively mundane, perhaps WDYTYA? is doing something quietly to redress these sad Hyacinth Bucket-ish prejudices. I recall, for example, how, earlier in the series, Jeremy Paxman seemed both irritated and beguiled by the journey on which he found himself (even before he got around to crying) - presumably because he wasn't in control of his destination. Which in turn proves that the show can be as revealing of its subjects as a stint on Celebrity Big Brother

Meanwhile the local social history - largely conducted, it seems, by amateurs, though maybe the BBC takes care of their expenses - is often unexpectedly fascinating, albeit in a programming-for-schools sort of way. In short, there are very few programmes one could imagine rolling on comfortably in a decade's time, but this is probably one of them.

While C4 currently seems to be all about instant gratification, BBC2 is terrifically good at creating slow-burning hits such as The Apprentice, Dragons' Den and Who Do You Think You Are? And they don't come much more slow-burning (though 'hit' might be stretching it a bit) than the oddly addictive Pay Off Your Mortgage in Two Years (currently two-thirds of the way through its run) in which a likeable presenter, René Carayol, oozes tough love and empathy persuading those who dream of living debt-free to develop potential money-spinning schemes, even while drawing their purse strings unfashionably tight.

For those taking part the results may be a lifetime of justifiable smuggery, but in the short term the financial sacrifices (René doesn't approve of holidays, for example) and increased workloads often reveal just how soft many of us have got - and how keen we are to reward ourselves with quite a lot of retail therapy for just a little bit of extra effort, as if our hard work is only validated by what we can be seen to buy with the results.

But for me almost the best thing about POYMITY is that viewers have another year to wait for a payoff series, in which we'll hopefully discover whether or not that nice couple from Essex who are selling costume jewellery and the charming ballet dancer setting up a fitness business will get to live their relatively modest dreams. The whole premise of POYMITY is, indeed, proudly modest and unhip and therefore entirely at odds with our buy-now-pay-later instant gratification culture, and I love it even more for that.

Mind you, I should (and I thought, indeed, that I would) be over that whole Celebrity Big Brother thing by now. But no - the ongoing Preston/Chantelle/Camille love triangle/meltdown/hellzone business has spilled out from the screen into the rest of my life, with spare time too often spent dipping toes into a guilty sea of Heat, OK! and Hello!

Frankly, there's only one sensible way to sort this out and that's for C4 to pay the three of them lots and lots of money to go back into the Big Brother house and work it out right there in front of us. Or if that doesn't appeal (and why not?) at least make them all visit the diary room daily in order to keep us up to date ...

An addiction to the lives of people one doesn't know is a debilitating thing, but a round-the-clock live feed is also the equivalent of a life-saving intravenous morphine drip - so help me Endemol, or Allah, or whoever is reall(it)y in charge.

Anyway, you may recall, many paragraphs ago, Jane Horrocks observing that she felt like Miss Marple. Which, having watched last week's star-littered ITV1 Agatha Christie, got me thinking that she'd probably make a fabulously Geraldine McEwanesque Marple in, ooh, about 20 years' time - especially given that this franchise is another of those shows you can imagine running for ever.

I think I'm probably undergoing some sort of emotional backlash against trendy telly, because I really enjoyed Marple. I loved (and so, clearly, did the cast) the eyebrow-archingness of lines such as:

'It may not have been the London Palladium, but it beat Thursday night Monopoly with mother and her friends into a cocked hat, I can tell you!' Or: 'Let's go to the theatre! Rookery Nook's on and I love a rollicking farce!' Or: 'He were a gentleman... and she weren't, if you get my meaning...'

Heaven, really - aside from a plot of predictably murderous complexity that, blessedly, managed to feature not a single paedophile, just a very obviously guilty Phil Davis ...#65279;trying on a pukka accent for a change.

And we were treated to a right old Bleak House of a celebrity cast (Nickolas Grace to Russ Abbot, via Sarah Parish Martin Kemp and Una Stubbs) enjoying what amounted to a rollicking farce with a side order of strangulation, among all of which - and here's the criticism - there was barely room for McEwan to make her presence felt. In fact the whole thing might easily have been solved by a voiceover from Anna-Louise Plowman (as the dead Helen Marsden) a la Desperate Housewives' Mary Alice - and even then I'm not sure I'd have missed Marple's presence.

And I don't think you could ever say the same of David Suchet's Poirot. Or of Newsnight supersleuth, Jeremy Paxman - still wielding the forensic scientist's tweezers of truth while investigating the excremental evidence provided by numerous guest-corpses.

There was a fabulous example of this last Monday, when Jezza went head to head with the singularly determined Anjem Choudary's barrage of weapons-grade Islamaballs. And it's fair to say that Paxman not only won the riveting skirmish in the War against Terror, but did so with the positively Marple-esque: 'We're moving on, matey! We're moving on! Oh, he'll never move on...'

Which thrilling, yet also oddly comforting moment made me believe that extremist Islamists can huff and puff and attempt to blow our houses up and down, but that in the end they are likely to be thwarted by the slings and arrows of an irascible interviewer - or possibly just the attentions of a little old lady with a very large handbag.