Susan seemed as ditsy as ever as she spilled a drink over the coma- patient wife of the Englishman (Scots actor Dougray Scott acting posh, like Roger Moore with a dash of the Prince of Wales) who was wooing her beside her hospitalised comatose lover. Gabrielle was still battling with her estranged husband and the maid, now a very pregnant and very demanding surrogate mother of their child. Bree had hooked up with another apparent nutcase, accepting the marriage proposal of the creepy mystery man Orson, who may have bumped off his wife for not folding his towels in perfect squares; I’m sure “perfect housewife” Anthea Turner would have approved. Only Lynette had anything fresh to wrestle with as she faced the clingy mother of her husband’s love child.

There were a few signs that the series might be regaining some of its knowing playfulness; the normally frigid Bree’s orgasmic climax after being turned on by Orson’s fussy rewashing of her clean wine glasses was the perfect pay-off for two years of repressive character development. And there was the promise of more interplay between the wives. But having a sinister killer husband as well as a new buried-body mystery seemed like uninspired rehashes from the first season. So it looks as if Wisteria Lane needs a few more showers to freshen things up.

Adapt or die used to be the Darwinian view of long-running TV series but now it seems to be a case of more of the same. Celebrity Big Brother (Channel 4) returned with another collection of the fragile and forgotten. The Big Brother franchise has become the cockroach of television, the programme you imagine will survive after a nuclear blast, scurrying alongside Last of the Summer Wine and Taggart (ITV1). The latter was also back offering more murder and dour investigation in Scotland. Although the series evolved into an ensemble cop drama after the departure of its title character and sidekick, that was years ago.

Last night’s story was sadly business as usual. Thanks to the plot, involving the laundering of armed-robbery money through horserace fixing, we didn’t get the usual concrete gloom and glowering towerblocks. Alec Norton as DCI Matt Burke, who makes an Easter Island statue look positively cheery, did the glowering instead. But like Norton’s face, the plot mechanics were set in stone with the usual deaths before the first two ad breaks and such lines as “Don’t blame yourself, you were only doing your job” being dusted off. Come on, guys, how about at least playing the whole thing with Welsh accents next time?

As The Old Grey Whistle Test Story (BBC Four) showed, BBC Two’s rock music programme moved from the laid-back, corduroyed insights of “Whispering” Bob Harris (“Phew! Rilly, rilly fine set there from Lynyrd Skynyrd”) in the 1970s to the brasher passions of Andy Kershaw atop proto-Ikean furniture in the 1980s. Until its demise in 1987, the show remained relatively straightforward: bands playing in what looked like a zero-atmosphere rehearsal studio. It never regained its former authority after sticking doggedly to its “albums-only” policy during the punk era when a musical revolution was taking place on the streets, in the clubs and on 45rpm.

In the end it couldn’t compete with the rise of the pop video and MTV — music programming without stagehands, a hitherto impossible dream. Yet having featured everyone from Captain Beefheart and Bowie to REM and a magnificently mulleted Bono, the series has secured its place in rock history. But catching the show’s early 1970s archive highlights that followed the documentary — it’s amazing how the cutting-edge graphics of the day can now look as antique as illuminated manuscripts — was also a reminder of how joyless rock music becomes if you take it too seriously. And can you imagine anyone today launching a contemporary music show with the words “old” and “grey” in the title?

Still, I’m glad the series never adopted an early title idea: Florence Foster Jenkins’s Musical Emporium.

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