Admittedly, as clouds and silver linings go, it’s a very, very big cloud and, by comparison, a pretty small sliver of a silver lining. But such is the output of Second World War- related films and television shows that the clothing industry must still be churning out almost as many German army uniforms each year as it was in the early 1940s; and that’s not counting the overtime bonuses that fall in its lap whenever a young royal attends a fancy dress party.

But does the docudrama sometimes lack the punch that their makers must be hoping for when choosing this format? Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial (BBC Two) is certainly a handsome production. The scenes in the Nuremberg court chamber are meticulously re-created to mimic the available archive footage. The whole thing is washed with colours that catapult you back to the 1940s.

Speer, Goering and Hess are played by Nathaniel Parker, Robert Pugh and Ben Cross; so this isn’t a show where the actors in the re-enactments have been cast from a classified ad in The Stage. There are more costumed extras than in Ben-Hur. It is diligently researched, so that the Allied prosecutors and Nazi defendants speak words culled from historical homework.

Yet there are times in Nuremberg when you feel that switching between archive footage and interviews with the surviving US prosecutors on the one hand, and re-enactments on the other, dilutes the potency of the exercise. It’s like a magician both stunning you with his sleight of hand and also revealing how he tricked you: it adds something to his performance, but also takes something away. Getting the balance right is a tricky formula to pull off.

In Nuremberg, for instance, the one image that made your blood run cold was not the depiction of Goering’s arrogance, or the speculation over whether Speer had used his charisma to outwit the prosecutors’ and thereby save his neck. Rather, it was a fragment of archive footage of what seemed to be a hillock of reject broken matches at a Swan Vesta factory, all snapped and twisted, until the camera moved in close enough for you to discern that these were, in fact, the piled-high, twig-thin corpses of thousands of naked concentration camp victims.

Now, remember the halfwits in your class at school? Did you ever wonder what became of them? Then watch Banged Up Abroad (Five). Chances are they ended up in this series. Do the names Scott Campbell and Lucy Baker ring a bell, for instance? Loath to return to a wet England after working the summer season in Ibiza, the couple pitched up in Amsterdam. A stranger in a bar offered them a deal: he would fly them to Costa Rica for an all-expenses-paid two-week holiday. The catch? They had to carry back to Amsterdam 2.5 kilos (5.5lb) each of cannabis. On their return they would each be handed 5,000 euros as a reward.

So this is how Lucy and Scott calculated whether to take up the stranger’s offer: (a) drugs seemed to be commonplace in Amsterdam, so the Dutch authorities probably wouldn’t make a fuss on their return; (b) they were both broke; and (c) . . . there wasn’t a (c).

Obviously, they didn’t make a decision as casually as that. No, they first flipped a coin, pledging to abide by its verdict. Even though it landed on “Don’t go” each time they tossed it, they went. On their final night in Costa Rica, thugs handed them cases to chaperone back to Amsterdam. These didn’t look like 5kg of cannabis. That’s because they contained nearly 16kg of cocaine. Costa Rican customs waved them through. But when they changed planes in Mexico, Mexican customs did not.

Lucy and Scott are now serving ten years in Mexican jails.

Both were filmed against a black cloth. It is only in the last few minutes, when the camera moves back, that you realise that the couple have been filmed in their squalid prison cells, enabling 15 minutes of interviews to be smartly stetched to an hour of documentary by means of re-enactments.

Nazis; drug-runners — re-enactments evidently tend to prove dirty work for actors: so if a casting agent should approach you in a bar and offer you money to do some, think carefully before agreeing. Or at least toss a coin first.

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