On 1916, RTE was simply following the lead of the state.

Everyone knows that the reason the government chose the more emotive date of Easter Sunday to hold its parade was because it was finally sick of being upstaged by Sinn Fein. From the vantage point of my couch, our defence forces looked impressive; well turned out, and with the whole cle-deis thing down to a tee . . . there would have been no room at all on O'Connell Street for that much cooler looking bunch with their berets and shades and face scarves. Okay, so it seemed at times like the antics of a South American military junta (and at one stage I thought they were going to unfurl a triptych of huge banners with the Taoiseach's image on them from the portico of the GPO), but the only way to beat the cooler kids in the playground is to show them you have catapults.

So instead of playing party hosts, Sinn Fein was reduced to pontificating on another of its pet subjects . . . drug crime. One of its Dublin TDs, Aongus O Snodaigh, was seen contributing last week to a profile of John Gilligan on Saibhir Ach Salach (Thursday, TG4), a new series about Irish criminals. He was interviewed in the notincongruous-seeming setting of a dimly-lit warehouse. The Shinners will probably try to pull a few stunts tomorrow, the proper anniversary of the Rising, but by then we'll all be 1916-ed out of it, not helped by the airing during the week of Hidden History: The Man Who Lost Ireland (Tuesday, RTE One). The title was only a slight overstatement: the actions of General John Maxwell, in having the Rising's leaders executed more or less at his own discretion, was exactly the outcome that Pearse had hoped for his adventure. Like Saibhir Ach Salach, The Man Who Lost Ireland had nothing new to offer to anyone who knew the subject, although it was so well put together and full enough of interesting titbits that it served perfectly well as a primer for the most who didn't.

One such interesting titbit was that because Dublin was placed under martial law in the weeks after the Rising, the rebels were tried under court martial.

Another was that the decision to hold the court martials of the rebels behind closed doors was later found to be illegal. Another was that the plural for 'court martial' is actually 'courts martial', although I'll probably continue to embarrass myself at parties by saying 'court martials'.

The other upcoming anniversary, as I've said, is of the Chernobyl disaster, and on this topic we had two programmes, Chernobyl Heart (Wednesday, RTE One) and Return to Chernobyl (Thursday, RTE One). Of the two, the Oscar-winning Chernobyl Heart was the most effective, a relentlessly upsetting slide show of the consequences of the 1986 nuclear-power-plant explosion.

The name was not an attempt at tweeness, but a description of one of the most common afflictions associated with the disaster:

congenital heart disease. The camera was allowed in on an operation to cure one such case of the condition. This patient was lucky . . . it takes a long time to get to the top of the waiting-list for this procedure in Belarus, and most on it will die while waiting.

The most powerful scene was when we saw a woman giving birth in a Belarusan maternity ward. With horrifying predictability, the baby that emerged had a misshapen head, and the regular screams of a mother in the moment of childbirth had a chilling extra resonance. It was a single haunting moment among many, all stacking up on each other to create a compelling appeal for action.

In Return to Chernobyl, TV presenter and green campaigner Duncan Stewart revisited the scene of an accident that almost killed him in 2003. Stewart's main reason for going back, however, was to continue the work he had originally gone to Belarus to undertake, which was the renovation of an orphanage and a daycare centre for Chernobyl victims. To Stewart's credit, his very serious accident (he fell out of a tree while trying to film a sunset) was not allowed to become the main focus in a programme that detailed many horrors. Indeed, like Adi Roche, who featured large in Chernobyl Heart, Stewart came across as a selfless and likeable person.

Finally, two episodes into Doctor Who (Saturday, BBC1), and David Tennant seems like the worst Doctor ever. I've been watching Doctor Who (not in a religious, Trekkie sort of way, but I did used to watch it on and off) since Peter Davison. That took me through the eras of the lamentable Colin Baker and the generallyconsidered-disastrous Sylvester McCoy. However, I do remember both of those incumbents reacting in a fairly normal way to moments of danger. They were both twits, undoubtedly, but they would never have allowed the tension to flag by being flippant at the wrong moment. Tennant, though, is the ultimate twit. He never stops being a twit. It could be argued that he's the culmination of a strain of twittishness that's crept into Doctor Who since the end of the era of Tom Baker, the last of the crotchety Doctors. He is resolutely twittish in the face of danger, with the consequence that there are virtually no tense moments in the current Doctor Who. This is awful. I wonder if it's too early to have him regenerated into someone old and badtempered like Nicholas Parsons.