Bill Oddie Back in the USA , Dr Alice Roberts: Don’t Die Young , Al Murray’s Happy Hour . . . Nowadays you’re practically nobody on television unless your name is in the title, although, like More Dawn French’s Girls Who Do Comedy , it can sound more like a whole TV listing. And you know you’ve really made it when you enjoy the kind of single-name recognition that means Jamie’s Chef is all you need. Clearly the recognition rating of the former BBC foreign correspondent Rageh Omaar is on the rise. Having made such films as Rageh Omaar’s Tsunami Journey , we now have Rageh Inside Iran (BBC Four).

The current Bush Administration rumblings about the country made this a timely attempt by Omaar to look beyond the “Cold War rhetoric” and see what everyday life is like there. Unsurprisingly (since it took a year of negotiations to get permission to film in Tehran), the best way to approach life is to know the labyrinthine laws so you can weave through them. Writers navigate between the “red lines” of deliberately vague censorship rules by censoring themselves. A pop entrepreneur knows his pretty-boy star signing can’t sing about “hot sexy topics”, but he can circumvent the ban on female lead vocalists by creating an all-girl band so no single person is the lead.

This offered intriguing glimpses of Iranian life but remained politically sketchy. It was so episodic that it was barely held together by Omaar’s attempt to profile prominent Iranian women — a businesswoman, a young film director and an NGO cancer-charity worker — for a local youth magazine. At times it was like an ever-hopping Coast with hijabs instead of hedgerows and Omaar as our walk-and-talk, cheerily enthusiastic guide. Yet it was his warm interest in everything around him that had him charming his way into people’s lives as he toured the different districts of Tehran.

It was, as the guidebooks put it, “a city of contrasts”. A holy shrine nestled in a shopping mall. There were sweatshops with child labour and an LA-style appetite for cosmetic surgery. There could be an antiBush, pro-Palestine demo one day, and a pop idol signing his record the next. Teenage boys felt comfortable enough to sport earrings and court girls in the confines of a shopping centre, although one girl described life for the young as being so restrictive that they were “bursting in other ways”, namely sex and drugs. A memorable moment occurred when Omaar, covering the opening of a new road tunnel, was suddenly asked to pray alongside the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As a clearly stunned Omaar remarked: “I was being spun, Iranian style.” The incident was a surreal reminder of an authoritarian state’s control. Although Omaar concluded that here was an Islamic theocracy being slowly challenged by its predominantly young population, he also mentioned at the end how the youth magazine was struggling to survive and the film director’s movie had not been passed by the censors. You were ultimately left wondering what fate still awaits those who stick their heads too far above the parapet.

As inside stories go, Omaar couldn’t match the insider views in Miracles in the Womb (Channel 4). Like a previous programme about mammals, this used ultrasound images, new imaging techniques and models to give us a “foetal odyssey”, this time of human multiple births. We got fascinating details about how twins, triplets and quadruplets grow and compete for resources in the womb, and such phenomena as “vanishing twin syndrome”, when a second or third foetus can be absorbed back into the uterus. But with so much methodical detail, it sometimes felt as if the programme was going to last nine months. And when the soothing tones of Dilly Barlow’s narration declared that behaviour in the womb often dictates what the child will be like, a friend remarked, “I don’t need a scientist to tell me that”; her son had spent his gestation standing, and apparently has barely sat down since. Science tends to catch up with what we already knew intuitively.

The commentary also slid disconcertingly between the scientific and the speculative, so what might simply have been involuntary reflexes between developing foetuses was seen as possible prenatal game-playing.

The poets Roger McGough and Brian Patten also gave us such unnecessary punctuating doggerel as: “Hear the conquering heroes/ Into the uterus everyone/ Each cell doing what it should/ Bridging the placenta and the blood.”

I hope this doesn’t start a trend in science programming — I can see the new touchy-feely Horizon giving us DNA sequencing as a limerick and string theory as a rap. Coming soon: Snoop Dogg’s Quasar Love .

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