Mummy’s War, and someone has had the bright idea of sending Carol Thatcher to both Argentina and the Falklands, to mark the 25th anniversary of the conflict. Thatcher clearly knows that this is an emotionally, diplomatically and personally complex situation to have agreed to. After all, she is to meet mothers of men killed at her own mother’s command — a scenario that most of us, however much of a nut-bag mummy might be, have never had to deal with. As someone who didn’t know the correct etiquette when my mother offered my startled prospective best friend Rachael Parry a homemade muesli biscuit (in Wolverhampton! In 1986! She might just as well have offered her blotter-acid and Axis: Bold as Love!), I feel for Thatcher minor very deeply. Our parents can put us in the stickiest of holes.

Still, as it turns out, my sympathy for Carol is completely wasted. I might as well be making understanding eyes at a wooden cat. As the daughter of the Iron Lady, she does, of course, already have her own, gigantic, complex coping mechanism — which, in this case, turns out to be a slightly forced, Joyce Grenfell-esque obsession with penguins.

“Welcome to Port Stanley!” a local diplomat greets her, as she disembarks from the plane. Dressed in a red adidas top and sporting excessively flyaway hair, Thatcher looks a great deal like Jimmy Savile, but the local diplomat is too diplomatic to mention this. Instead, he starts to tell her about local weather conditions, and what she can expect during her stay — but is interrupted by a posh, beaky hoot from his guest.

“Eoh!” Thatcher exclaims, trotting past him. “Is that a penguin?” And there is, indeed, a pretty rubbish concrete statue of a penguin next to the customs shack. “Lovely fellow,” Thatcher babbles, rubbing his stone head. Ten minutes later, she’s on a shooting range. “Have we shot a penguin?” During a drive: “Are there penguins down there?”

Lovely to chat about animals, something universally loved. Makes it hard for someone to turn that into a conversation about how her mother has the same pale, galactic insaniac eyes as Emperor Palpatine.

On the Argentine leg of the journey, however, Thatcher meets a slightly less appreciative audience. She is met at the airport with banners reading “Thatcher — you nonpleasing person,” and people shouting “war criminal”. She meets up with women who lost sons in the war, and — both ill-advisedly and bafflingly, in terms of her future broadcasting career — treats their emotional outbursts with a cold, off-putting disdain.

“She is like her mother,” the women say to each other, in Spanish. “She will never understand.”

ITV1’s Jane Austen season continues with Northanger Abbey, a fairly straightforward, vanilla, Andrew Davies-by-numbers adaptation that is ultimately notable for only two things: 1) J J Feild makes a hot Tilney, and 2) The ending feels inexplicably rushed. In under a minute, Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones, 7/10, good teeth) goes from heartbroken exile to happiness, with nary a word about the previously pivotal opinions of Admiral Tilney and his Paul Weller hair-do. Surely, of all the dramas in the world, an adaptation of Austen shouldn’t have the audience going “But what happened? What did that all mean? Oh, it’s just like Lost.”

Finally, television can never get enough of irascible, middle-aged, self-made men LAYING DOWN THE LAW and TELLING IT STRAIGHT, and this week, two of them get to duke it out for bombastic televisual supremacy — like two old triceratops in Paul Smith suits, fighting over a particularly leafy shrub.

In the red corner — Sir Alan Sugar, returning for a new series of the always enjoyable The Apprentice, and no more inclined to give someone a shoulder massage and kiss on the cheek than he was last year. In the blue corner — Sir Harvey Goldsmith, the Live Aid promoter, now recast as a showbiz troubleshooter in Get Your Act Together . The Apprentice you know. You will have set Sky+ for it. You will have been right to do so. Get Your Act Together, meanwhile, has Goldsmith trying to whip the failed Irish pop star Samantha Mumba into shape, to which Mumba proves singularly unresponsive. Indeed, she seems to go out of her way to wind Goldsmith up, in a series of enjoyably embarrassing scenes.

You know what — two irascible management mavens on the go means we’re all winners. And that’s good business sense.

Mummy’s War, Thur, C4, 9pm; Northanger Abbey, Sun, ITV1, 9pm; The Apprentice, Wed, BBC One, 9pm; Get Your Act Together with Harvey Goldsmith, Tues, C4, 9pm

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010