Pity the poor props-buyer for Bodies. What a depressing list to have to write out at the start of each series. “Thirty six (36) full-term uteruses with bilateral incisions. Nineteen (19) bulging vaginas in the final stages of labour. Twenty six (26) slightly blue newborn babies. Nine (9) litres of mixed meconium, blood and vernix to grease them up with. Ten (10) litres of amniotic fluid. Five (5) pumps to spray the amniotic fluid all over the shoes of the cast in the event of waters breaking/making incision into fake uterus. Four (4) unviable deformed foetuses. Three (3) dead babies. A big jar of period. Huge genital warts. A well-rotted, pre-used item of feminine hygiene. Abortion pills. Tears. Big knives.”

There’s a bag of props you wouldn’t want to nick out of the back of someone’s car. Unless you were planning to make a Sledgehammer-style video for a Tracey Emin poem, anyway. Imagine getting home with what you thought was a bag of deflated pink space-hoppers, only to find it was a prosthetic mock-up of a complete cervical prolapse. Re-gifting would be out of the question.

Debate has long raged on whether Bodies — which came to the end of its second series on Saturday (BBC Two) — is simply TV OB-GYN doom-porn. A manifestation of society’s barely buried disgust, fear and fetishisation of the fertile female body, played out in a weekly series of bursting wombs, blood-splattered sheets, parasitic foetuses and women writhing in agony. This is, after all, a programme in which Keith Allen, as a misogynistic gynaecologist, performs abortions to the Jam’s That’s Entertainment.

And the answer to this question, of course, is to ask whether this series would ever have been made if it were equally graphic, but set on a gastroenterology ward specialising in very old, tetchy men. Obviously the answer is “Ugh, of course not”. There’s no semi-sexual Hammer Horror frisson to be gained from watching a convulsing veteran of Gallipoli fill three kidney-dishes in a row with effluence, while a nurse screams “Call the CRASH team!” Keith Allen would never take a role where he had to put his hand up the back of a gippy OAP.

However, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with a series that is OB-GYN doom-porn. After all, if men think that they’re fascinated and terrified by the female body, they should talk to the ladies. Chaps, we’re terrified of the things. We haven’t got a clue what’s going on down there. It’s like being in charge of some ludicrous back-firing menstrual invention of Professor Branestawm’s. Pregnancy, birth, abortions, RU-486, haemorrhage, even cystitis, to be honest — thanks to modern, discreet medical practices, we never really know what these things fully entail.

For many of my female friends, watching Bodies, then, has been by way of viewing a slo-mo action replay of the most horrific gynaecological incidents of their lives, but this time, from the other end. Personally, I’m grateful for that dramatic facility and have been told by my doctor that it’s medically advisable for there to be another series soon.

An equally painful reliving of messy operations to move unwelcome incumbents came with How to Be a Tory Leader (Saturday, BBC Two). Obviously one can never watch too many times the footage of Margaret Thatcher madly signing treaties in Paris, while her party, back at home, were binning her, but there were other clips here I would like to see on much heavier rotation in future political programming. Most of them, it has to be said, featured candid footage of either Ted Heath or Lord Hailsham dancing — but then, perhaps only someone with the potent combination of madness and balls to believe that they could spontaneously learn to jitterbug at the 1978 Tory Party conference would hope to be leader of the Conservative Party in the first place.

Michael Portillo had a Puddleglumishly downcast view of the post: “The job of Conservative leader, in opposition, with no hope of winning, is the worst job in the Western world.” And this is a man who has regularly appeared on Newsnight Review alongside Tony Parsons, and so should know.

It was the sudden reappearance of Margaret Thatcher, however, that made the show — she seems, in her absence, to have had eyeliner permanently tattooed on her lower lid, like Michael Jackson.

Robert Winston’s The Story of God started on BBC One on Sunday. Alas, despite my anticipation, it turned out not to be a racy semi-fictionalised biopic in the style of The Queen’s Sister, but just Winston banging on about Buddha and the Aztecs.

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