I've a dull, relentless headache, it's hard to breathe and the way I'm feeling now, I'm not sure I'm going to make it." Can you hear those descending, ever-portentous tones?

Now imagine that tone for nearly an entire show. For the rest of his mysterious (in the sense that it was never explained what the hell Charlie Bird was doing in the Amazon) journey down the world's longest river . . . at least until he got to a city and had a chance to take a shower . . . this was a journey into Charlie's heart of darkness.

When he wasn't moaning about the altitude, it was the cold; when it wasn't the cold, it was the heat.

And so on and on and on . . . from the humidity, to the creepy crawlies, to the shoddiness of his hotel room, to the flimsiness of his river boat, to freshwater dolphins trying to bite his mickey off, to the state of Peruvian bananas ("they're not the kind of bananas we have at home, and I don't particularly like them") . . .

punctuated by his regular sniping at his native guides, like some colonial governor's delicate wife.

It seemed cruel to put a 56-yearold given to seeing the bleak side of life through all that. But then without the moaning, Charlie Bird Explores the Amazon would have been just another extreme-travel show with an environmental conscience lightly throwing about terms such as "an area of forest the size of Switzerland". And even though the incessant moaning was a bit too much, it was still hard to dislike Bird at the end of it, because you saw the fear in him in every crease and bead of sweat and, assuming he had some say in how this was edited, at least he was honest enough to allow himself be shown as a complete wet blanket.

I found it difficult to dislike the title character of Ugly Betty too, but then that's the point of it . . . you're meant to think this train-trackwearing geeky girl caught up in the bitchy, beauty-fascist world of fashion journalism is simply adorable. The programme itself is quite enjoyable, but it's basically a kids' show, set in a cartoon universe full of caricatures and farcical set-ups. It's only when we visit Betty's home in Queens does it appear to be saying something meaningful, about the status of Hispanics in the US. And it isn't just Betty stuck in an unlikely setting. Spotted in Monday evening's double bill were Dawn from The Office, that Scottish one out of Extras, and Jim Robinson from Neighbours, who, even though he's previously appeared in another high-profile US TV show (The OC), will always be known to people of a certain age as Jim from Neighbours.

Speaking of old friends: This Life was back last week for a reunion.

Great! . . . Esther Rantzen and the gang, risque typos on cafe menus, tales of consumer woe, dogs that say "sausages"f I was rubbing my hands together. But of course this wasn't about Esther Rantzen. It was about those awful people from that awful '90s drama series about house-sharing young lawyers.

Everything you need to know about the show was contained in the soundtrack to last week's 10th anniversary gathering. In one little sequence . . . when one of the characters was twiddling with her iPod . . . we heard songs from Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, music for pseudosophisticates put there not just to invoke nostalgia for the characters' mid-'90s heyday, but to make you feel like an unrefined runt if you weren't, around 1996, buying Taschen coffee-table books and Danish furniture and putting cigarettes out in the pot of your yucca plant. A scene in which the cast danced about like lunatics to a Manic Street Preachers number was without doubt the most embarrassing 20 seconds of TV I've ever seen. Thank God I was never a fan of the original series . . .can you imagine how much more embarrassing that scene would have seemed to me if I had been?

I'm Foster, He's Allen, a film about singing duo Foster and Allen, was cringey too, although at least you could laugh through the facialmuscle strain. It's just not possible, post-Father Ted, to view footage of Foster and Allen without thinking of 'My Lovely Horse'. It's also hard not to think of comedians Reeves and Mortimer's hilarious take-off, Mulligan and O'Hare ("In 39 years, we've never had an argument, " said Mick Foster; "I am you, and you are me, " sang Mulligan and O'Hare). Whoever it was that selected those clips of the duo together on a two-seater bicycle, or rowing in tandem on a lake . . . out of all the hundreds of hours of footage that must have been filmed of Foster and Allen . . . has a devilish sense of humour.

Reviewed Charlie Bird Explores the Amazon Thursday, RTE1 Ugly Betty Monday, RTE2 This Life Tuesday, BBC2 I'm Foster, He's Allen, Sunday, RTE1