Dawkins on Darwin was a bracing mixture of evolution, atheism and empathy

The Genius of Charles Darwin (Channel 4) opened with Professor Dawkins standing on a cliff holding Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Probably the director just told him to stand there and say something. He did not mention the sea of faith or the melancholy long withdrawing roar, but what he said was stirring enough. He was going to tell us about, perhaps, the most powerful idea ever to occur to a human mind.

Professor Dawkins is a fiery-eyed atheist ("Evolution is one of the reasons I don't believe in God") and a man with a mission ("I think it's scandalous how little our children are taught about evolution"). To remedy this he took a class of sceptical teenagers fossil-hunting. We never knew their names, their religious beliefs or anything about them. Dawkins is, if I may use the word, rather godlike in his dealings with the young. "Do you know what our ancestors were like 200m years ago? They would have been like shrews, little whiskery, twitchy things."

The general consensus was that there was probably something in this evolution but, as one lad put it, "I still say my prayers." A shrewd each-way bet.

The first programme was about Charles Darwin himself, a more curious man in some ways than Dawkins mentioned. He was, like several prominent Victorians, prone to psychosomatic illness. He had a daughter who died very young and he found that utterly intolerable. His expression, before it was awash with whiskers, looks beleaguered. After the voyage of the Beagle he showed no appetite for foreign travel but, luckily, the mail was magnificent. ("He wrote letters and back the letters flowed from all around the world.") He became, endearingly, a pigeon-fancier, attending shows in a top hat. Pigeons and dogs have trustingly thrown in their lot with man and can be bred into bizarre shapes at his whim. Cats can't. They are always unmistakably cats. Why is that, professor?

He showed us Darwin's piano and marked out the history of life on the keyboard. "We have nothing but bacteria all the way up here past middle C. The dinosaurs don't come in till about here." Ping went the high note, an unexpected sound for a dinosaur. "The whole of human history would occupy a space of less than half a piano string right at the top of the keyboard."

Quite suddenly, he showed raw empathy for all bleeding, suffering things. "The amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to say this, millions of animals are running for their lives, whimpering with fear. Thousands are dying from starvation or disease or feeling a parasite rasping away from within. For most animals the reality is struggling, suffering and death." An antelope bounding along in perfect arcs was seized by a lioness leaping vertically from the grass. These are the Olympics of the natural world. Faster, higher, stronger or deader.

Man's only enemy are those bugs that took up so much of Darwin's keyboard. In Africa Dawkins met the evocatively named Salome, a middle-aged prostitute, who has evolved an extraordinary resistance to the Aids virus, an immunity she should be able to pass on to her children. He asked her how she accounted for this. Salome said God had been good to her. That must have really got up Dawkins' nose.

I'm Kylie's Body Double (BBC3) was a lively idea stretched far beyond its natural elasticity. If a star falls short in some department or is, as they prefer to put it, too busy, the studio calls on Nina with her rhubarb-stick fingers ("Kate Moss's nails are a little unpredictable") or Rachael with her pop-star measurements ("I do the bum shots and the boob shots").

Kayko, a leg model, was the best talker, being a New Yorker: "I think I've got chicken legs and now, dammit, I'm making money outta these chicken legs." Less money, however, than she made in America because there is less call for black models. Steve was fluent, too, because he used to be a lawyer
before his outstanding penis was talent-spotted. We had to take this on trust as it was obliterated throughout.

My particular favourite was Jason, a fork-lift truck-driver who could be a body double for Rasputin or Chewbacca but is hopefully launching out as a hand model.

Contretemps in Coronation Street (ITV1). There was an embarrassing scene in a Calais hypermarket when Janice told the staff that Audrey was the Duchess of Cornwall. It is not recorded if she was offered free beer or pelted with fresh croissants, but the experience obviously rankled. "I am nothing like Camilla Parker Bowles," Audrey said, tossing her discreetly tinted hair. Oh, absolutely! On the other hand, now you mention it, there is a certain je ne sais quoi.