So many bodies pile up by the end of Hamlet that had it been written last week Arnold Schwarzenegger might have considered getting involved (“O mosst perneecious vooman! O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!”), but that still doesn’t mean that you have to agree with Alan Yentob’s claim at the start of Imagine . . . Being Hamlet (BBC One) that “there can’t be many actors in the world who haven’t dreamt of playing Hamlet”. Arthur Mullard? Sylvester Stallone?

But does playing the role of Hamlet turn out to be a dream, or a nightmare? That’s what Yentob was keen to find out. “Hamlet,” reckons Yentob, is “the biggest part you can get as an actor. And it must be the scariest . . . It is the largest part Shakespeare wrote and it contains the most quoted, most famous lines ever written.”

Mostly it turns out to be a nightmare: but a nightmare that you’re grateful to have. Like being married to Marilyn Monroe, maybe. Or possibly directing Marilyn Monroe (Billy Wilder was happy to use Monroe because, he said, while his Aunt Minnie might arrive on set punctually, nobody would pay to see his Aunt Minnie in a movie. But he also pointed out that he was the only director to make two movies with Monroe: “Forget the Oscar! I deserve the Purple Heart.”).

Playing Hamlet is a nightmare for most of the actors quizzed by Yentob, apart, perhaps, from Ed Stoppard. That would be Tom’s boy, judging by the cheekbones, the nose, mouth, eyes, jaw and the diffident self- confidence. Stoppard, who is playing Hamlet in the West End, seems to find the exposure daunting, but essentially exhilarating; a privilege for any actor.

Simon Russell Beale was terrified when he was offered the part; not least because he thought he was a little podgy to play the Prince. “There was a headline in the Malvern local paper — we opened in Malvern — now what was it? ‘To Be Or Not To Be: Fat Is The Question’. That was the headline.” Derek Jacobi dried on stage when playing Hamlet. When Peter Hall asked David Warner to play Hamlet at the National, Warner accepted but felt so insecure that he wondered if Hall really meant it: “I asked him to make me a little unofficial contract. So he wrote on a piece of paper ‘I promise to direct David Warner in Hamlet’. And I looked at it and said, ‘No, can we redraft this?’ — being insecure — and he said, ‘OK, what do you want me to write?’” So Warner told him to write: “I promise to direct David Warner as Hamlet in Hamlet.”

Those without the talent to invest their skill in playing Hamlet seem increasingly to want to invest their cash in buying and selling property. With the opportunities for buying investment properties in Britain having shrivelled, what with us now all being buy-to-let investors, Property Developing Abroad (Five) is here to weigh up the propsects overseas.

This new series, presented by Gary McCausland, is part A Place in the Sun, part Location, Location, Location. McCausland has the air of a pushy estate agent. Having taken a would-be investor, Georgina Pettit, to a skiing village in Bulgaria, he asks: “So your objective is you want to double your money? How much money do you want to make?” At each property he shows her, McCausland estimates Georgina’s profits at up to 30 per cent within a year. What, even though the place is a building site, with more apartment blocks rising almost overnight?

To nobody’s surprise except Georgina’s, the developers of the apartment she chooses don’t finish work on time. When it is complete, there are wires hanging out of walls and the electric sockets don’t work. The delays eat into Georgina’s rental profits. Also McCausland — seeing footage of Georgina signing the contract — squawks: “Unbelievably, when it comes to signing the deeds, Georgina is alone! She is signing documents to take legal ownership of her property, but hasn’t a clue about the specifics of what she’s signing . . . When Georgina decides to sell on she may discover things in the contract that may cause her more heartache.” Now he says!

At the end of the programme McCausland revisits the three other properties he also showed Georgina. Curiously, none of them, a year or so on, appears to be showing anywhere near a 30 per cent profit. But McCausland remains undaunted, as convinced as ever that only an idiot ever lost money buying property in what is effectively a building site in a faraway country where you don’t speak the language, or understand the laws on property or taxation.

For the doubt-free McCausland, to invest or not to invest is clearly never a question that ever seems to need asking.

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