Oh, I don’t know. They ask you to cover the TV preview, and you leap at the chance. In fact, you are quite excited. So you nip out on to the stairwell with a photographer, and you strike a variety of wacky poses with remote controls in your mouth, even though they are not nearly as nice, nor, frankly, as clean, as the ones they give their regular columnist, Caitlin Moran.

You prepare yourself, zen-like, for 800 words of exquisitely-honed wit and whimsy. And that’s when they turn around and say: “Oh, by the way Hugo, it would be nice if you started with Malcolm and Barbara: Love’s Farewell, an intimate portrait of one man’s decline into madness and death through Alzheimer’s.” Super. That’ll have them in stitches.

So, no, there is not much funny about Malcolm and Barbara, though it has already become the most talked-about programme of the week. It shows us 11 years in the life of a married couple, from the husband’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease at the relatively tender age of 51, to his death in February of this year. This is an hour and a half of a woman crying because the man she loves is dying, and verges, at times, on the unwatchable. Although not exactly a part two, Malcolm and Barbara is a reprise of an earlier documentary, from 1999. The first won plaudits from the Alzheimer’s Society, and won Barbara, Malcolm’s wife and carer, an MBE.

Malcolm, a music lecturer from Homerton College, Cambridge, was a brilliant pianist, and his musical ability stayed with him for disarmingly long – for longer, even, than he could identify a piano from a sketch, or from the word “piano”. The early years are thus shot through with his music, and with images of this baffled, terrified man momentarily at peace, deftly picking his way across a keyboard.

At first, even as his brain decays, Malcolm remains playful. He hugs his wife, he dances, he makes up little nonsense rhymes from the babbling in his head. For the viewer, there is almost a temptation to beatify.

It doesn’t last. When Malcolm starts to go, he doesn’t go softly. Barbara sobs, drinks and wrestles with guilt as the gentle musician starts to slap and shove and shout. At no point does the film-maker Paul Watson pull his punches. We see everything; from the trousers round the ankles in the bathroom to the gin bottles piling up by the back door – the progression to the literal end. Barbara’s honesty, also, is total. She misses sex, she misses her husband loving her, she misses loving him.

There’s no redemption and no Hollywood moment of holding hands in the sunshine. For families unlucky enough to have first-hand experience of dementia, as mine does, it will make for either a terrifying vision of the future, or a bleak reminder of the past. Many, I suspect, won’t last the full hour and a half. It makes you want to go and find somebody you love, and cry, and hug them, and be grateful that they still recognise you enough to hug back.

And now, a seamless transition into Jamie at Home, the new cookery series from Jamie Oliver. This sees Oliver in his sprawling Essex home, grabbing handfuls of things from his own real vegetable garden and then traipsing into his own real kitchen to cook them.

I suppose they couldn’t lie about it being his own real home, in the current climate, but I for one would like to see it investigated. Just like his own real taste in music, or his own real friends in those Sainsbury’s adverts, it all seems suspiciously perfect. Still, if you can put up with him spluttering “get them tomatoes wazzed up to a pulp!”, or “imagine, yeah, being this sausage”, then this is all perfectly watchable, mouthwatering stuff.

Oh look, I’m always a bit conflicted about Jamie Oliver. I suppose it is guilt. Years ago, my flatmate and I had a picture of him on our toilet door, and, when we had a party, we asked everybody to write the rudest thing they could think of on his forehead. Most of it was far too rude for a family newspaper. Probably even too rude for The Guardian. And then he turned out to be a saint, with all that school dinners business. I’ve never quite forgiven myself.

But look at me now, harping on about myself and my friends, when I ought to be telling you about television. Honestly. Anybody would think I was covering for A. A. Gill.

Malcolm and Barbara: Love’s Farewell, Wed, ITV1, 9pm; Jamie at Home, Tues, C4, 8pm. Caitlin Moran is on holiday

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