I found the latter two the easiest to warm to. Any vague preconceptions I might have had about Rita and Charlene and their social backgrounds were blown out of the water by their instant likeability and by the insight into their warm and loving home lives that the programme gave us.

Mica was less immediately sympathetic, but probably the most deserving of sympathy. To begin, this was someone who fretted about being left on her "Tobler" on the big day. When her first-choice debs-date abandoned her due to cricketing commitments, she turned to a bloke called . . . believe it . . . Ross.

Never mind . . . there was always solace in "DMCs" ("like, deep and meaningful conversations?") with her girlfriends, who all wore the standard UCD freshers' uniform of Abercrombie hoodies and those tumbling birds'-nest hairdos that make girls look like Edwardian suffragettes. By dint of her sheer shameless southsidedness, however, Mica eventually won us over. But there was something else about her, a sadness that came through in allusions to a splintered and dispersed family and an ultimately bathetic debs night that resulted in her being kicked out of the venue four times. It wasn't Mica's way to show self-pity . . . the poignancy of her circumstances was allowed to subtly transmit itself, which was characteristic of this skilfully-made and unexpectedly touching programme.

We've seen plenty of documentaries in the last few years dealing with the disastrous situation in Iraq, but few of them have literally taken us into the heart of the country. Saddam's Road to Hell did just that, in the company of Mohammed Assam, a minister in the Kurdish regional government, as he sought to gather evidence of Saddam Hussein's genocide against Kurds in order to build an indictment against the former dictator. The view from Assam's jeep as it traversed the empty highways was of an inhospitable place of wreckage-strewn moonscapes;

people he interviewed along the way were cagey, utterly distrustful or haunted-looking. In the film Borat, the titular character tells an American rodeo audience that he hopes the US bombs Iraq so that life from the lowest lizard up is exterminated. When Assam eventually locates a Kurdish mass grave in the southern desert, a lizard is seen skittering away: not even reptiles want to live in the land of death anymore.

If Iraq has a figurative polar opposite on earth, it's Bhutan, the heavenly Himalayan kingdom that was the Charles Rangeley Wilson's latest fishing destination in The Accidental Angler. On top of all its other magical virtues, it's an angler's dream, Bhutan: only a trickle of visitors are permitted inside its borders annually, and because it's an exclusively Buddhist country, the pursuit of aquatic or any other game isn't a popular pastime. Towards the end of this show, Wilson mused that he might well have found Shangri-La.

Two episodes down, and I think I've discovered a Shangri-La in the schedules. I'm naturally biased because I'm a fisherman, but really, you don't need to be a hook-head to appreciate this series. In the same way that fishing isn't all about catching fish (a lot of its appeal is that it somehow stops you from thinking for hours on end), The Accidental Angler is as much as anything a quirky travel programme with important points to make about environmental conservation.

Not for some people though the easy release of a mellow pastime such as fishing. The first instalment of fly-on-the-wall Young At Heart introduced us to an American-based singing group, with an average age of 80, whose repertoire is made up of rock songs. The rest of the series will follow them in rehearsals for a new show.

I mention it here because last week provided the TV music highlight of the year, one of those weird but oddly logical moments, like Pan's People miming Clash songs on Top of the Pops. Suddenly the Ramones' mighty 'I Wanna Be Sedated' took on a new meaning when seen and heard performed by the residents of a nursing home wheezing the words: "Put me in a wheelchair/ Get me on a plane/ Hurry hurry hurry/ Before I go insane/ I can't control my fingers/ I can't control my brain/ Oh no no no no no." I hope somewhere down the line they tackle Tom Waits' 'I Don't Wanna Grow Up'.

Reviewed Diary of a Debutante, Wednesday, TV3 Saddam's Road to Hell, Monday, Channel 4 The Accidental Angler, Sunday, BBC2 Young At Heart, Wednesday, Channel 4