You can’t get fruitier than a hot posh chick being clever. It is the mark of a channel’s intelligence when it realises that while it could get some dollymop in an evening gown (Tess Daly, Kate Thornton) to “interview” reality TV show contestants, what really gets the nation going is a classically educated foxtress saying “ sesquipedalian”, while wearing a cardie from Whistles.

So, while Channel 4 has Kirstie Allsopp in Location, Location, Location, BBC Two has Victoria Coren in Balderdash and Piffle (which returns soon), Nigella Lawson quoting Homer while basting geese, and now Dr Alice Roberts. She’s gone from stringer on Coast to presenter of her own series — Dr Alice Roberts: Don’t Die Young.

Dr Alice is some serious PhD booty. She looks like Sir John Tenniel’s classic illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, rocks an impressive 12 letters after her name (MB, BCh, BSc, ILTM) and surfs at the weekend. Doubtless, she could also talk dirty in Latin while doing hard sums, and maybe even riding a horse, too. Her air of carefree capability is devastating. She could easily invade and subsequently rule any of the Channel Islands, in under 24 hours.

This innate monarchial grace is exemplified in a single moment in Don’t Die Young. Within the first ten minutes of Roberts’s big televisual promotion, the narrative calls for her to emerge from a lavatory brandishing a jug of her own fresh, warm urine — a feat that she manages with serene, unabashed aplomb. Neither Selina Scott nor Mark Lawson has ever been called upon to do such a thing — or if they were, the director who suggested it is still rotting in some televisual gulag, trying to sew his nuts back on. Yet Roberts not only does it, but comes out of the whole affair looking even more scrumptious — something to do with the bracing, no-nonsense attitude that makes nurses similarly alluring, I suppose.

Roberts’s urine display is all in the cause of the greater good of her series, of course. As part of her quest to ensure we don’t die young, Roberts is giving the nation a tour of the more interesting of the body’s organs, starting with the kidneys.

“Today, we’re learning to love our kidneys,” Roberts proposes, at the top of the show. By way of explaining how much liquid our busy offal processes, Roberts stands in front of a gigantic waterfall, and casually mentions that, over the course of a lifetime, our kidneys deal with some bogglingly large volume — 15 minutes’ worth of Niagara, or some such. To be honest, I wasn’t paying that much attention — I was wondering whether Roberts’s complexion was, when you come down to it, more like a rose, or narcissus petals.

But, either despite or because of Roberts’s profound ur-yin, Don’t Die Young stands as a well put-together, straightforward, entertaining show. It aims to do for the human body what Top Gear does for cars: silly experiments, bit of chitty-chat, and something to talk about the next morning. Like, “I Googled her, and she lives in Bristol!” and “I Googled her, and she says she lives in sin with a ‘dirty field archaeologist’. I think I’m going to kill myself.”

More possible reasons for suicide among the delicate come with the return of Wild at Heart, ITV1’s safari-drama — drafari, perhaps, or, more pertinently, sadrama. Any episode of Wild at Heart will follow a perhaps reassuringly similar route. The Trevanion family — Stephen Tompkinson as a lion-hugging vet, Amanda Holden as his frequently tetchy wife, plus some stage-school kids — have relocated to Africa. Now living in the middle of their own wildlife reserve, they weekly have some manner of disaster — more often than not caused by a rampaging wild animal. This is then solved by either a) their unfailing pluck and inherent decency, or b) the unfailing pluck and decency of the local natives who, of course, love the Trevanions for their unfailing pluck and etc. Of course, even the most non-Africa-literate of viewers will suspect that, by and large, it’s not unfailing pluck and inherent decency that gets you out of the hole when a load of lions start sizing up your kids, but a large shotgun and a diversionary bag of chops. The lions play up pretty much every week, as well. The show drama is basically My Family and Mainly Lions.

In the opening episode for the new series, the lions work in tandem with an elephant, and trash Amanda Holden’s nascent African weddings business — only for her to be bailed out, etc etc. At the end, the Africa- crazy Stephen Tompkinson has to reaffirm his commitment to his frankly stupid idea to be a vet in Africa with the line “I’m drunk on this place” — surely dialogue no one should be asked to say unless the scene is set in a distillery.

Finally, The Madness of Modern Families is a genuinely intriguing topic, wholly wasted on this silly and fanciful Grumpy Old Men-alike. A series of who-he? contributors make frankly made-up claims on, this week, the “madness” of modern middle-class children’s birthday parties. One mother insists her husband dressed as Neptune for her daughter’s first birthday party, while another assures us that she decorated a cake using a machete. Listen guys, I live in Crouch End, three doors down from Tamzin Outhwaite. If this kind of stuff really were happening at ludicrous middle-class children’s parties, I’d be on the front line.

Dr Alice Roberts: Don’t Die Young, Tues, BBC Two, 8pm; Wild at Heart, Sun, ITV1, 8pm; The Madness of Modern Families, Tues, BBC Two, 8.30pm.