As a million parents of birthday boys and girls say every year, bring in the clowns. It is amazing, said one of the children's entertainers in Daisy Asquith's highly watchable documentary, Clowns (BBC Two), that there is not more panic about their credentials. People are not otherwise in the habit of inviting rouge-cheeked strangers in baggy trousers into the company of their infants. Tommy Tickle admitted if he were not a clown himself he'd probably be first with the paedo jokes. (As it is, when they start with the jibes, he feels like kicking them in the f***ing nuts.) It soon became apparent, however, that the real problem with clowns is not that they like children too much, but that so many don't like them at all.

Tickle was a case in point. A plump, bald man with a voice as crusty as Krusty's, he even thought his own daughter “vile”. Kids these days, they had no moral boundaries. He always wore a cricket box, because you can tell a child 100 jokes but there is none as funny as punching a clown in the nuts.

Tickle spends a lot of time in shopping centres twisting balloons into the shape of swans for children who would be impressed only by a Play-Station 4. He ends his busy days in costume, in the pub, drinking himself into oblivion, giving himself another three, four, five years, max, in this job. His view was that it helps to have had “a massive amount of personal upheaval in your life”. That way when you are in a room of screaming kids who only want to punch you in the butt, “it seems an all right night”.

There was one child, he recalled, who called him Mr Poo Head, constantly, for 40 minutes. Now Tickle had anger issues, but lose your temper in this job and it's high profile. That was what The Great Velcro discovered, 63 years old, a clown for 30 years, who hit a kid who had messed with his equipment and then turned weird (“started looking at my balls and going, kiss, kiss, kiss”). He gave him a little slap, and all the other kids wanted to know if he would be going to jail. He was arrested and got a caution. He entertains pensioners in old folks home now, a quiet crowd, but respectful.

If Asquith wasn't talking to clowns with issues around children she was talking to clowns with issues around parents. Potty the Pirate's back story just wasn't funny. He had gone through 14 schools, his father had been a raging alcoholic, his mother was a Jesus freak. She now turns up to his shows and makes a point of not laughing, not even at the ventriloquism bit with the giant rat. She wished Potty would settle down and have children of his own. Potty thought it unlikely. We saw him on a date with a presentable Hungarian accountant. She had no real complaints, but noted he kept making “pirate noises in inappropriate places.”

At least Mr Pumpkin, after a Freddie Mercury-impersonating phase, was married with three sons. But he was in torment because his mother had Alzheimer's and no longer cuddled him. He invited Asquith to meet her but because this was one of the worst-edited documentaries ever (all sorts of continuity slips with clowns one moment in make-up, the next without, repeated images, unidentified locations), we never did. He had always been his mum's entertainer. Now he had lost his audience.

The confusing jump cuts and flashbacks in Damages (BBC One) are intended. As the American legal thriller concluded last night, I realised that this must be the most jerked about narrative since Nostromo or, maybe, Tennyson's Maud. Patty Hewes, the evil lawyer played by Glenn Close, came not into the garden but to the grave of her still-born daughter. That's motivation. The twist was that it was Patty's lot, not her enemy, Frobisher's, who tried to kill our heroine Ellen. Now she's going back to work for Patty as a spy for the Feds in series two. Oh, and Frobisher was killed. Probably.

I don't mind time shifts in theory but in practice they chopped up the scenes so finely that it was hard to enjoy the acting, not that in the case of Rose Byrne as Ellen we missed much. But I'm no expert. Tim Teeman, your Other TV Reviewer, is. Quote him, you BBC publicity people, not me.

Out of the Box

What is happening to BBC One News? The bright, smart studio with its “windows” overlooking London is seen less and less as more bulletins come from the noisy bowels of News 24. A spokeswoman says the builders are in. “The department is moving towards the launch of a fully operational multimedia newsroom at the end of the month, and subsequently, there has had to be some juggling with regards to the floor space.” But treasure those windows while you can. The whole shebang, including News 24, will look very different, very soon.

In Dispatches: The Inconvenient Truth on Channel 4, Rageh Omaar was investigating immigration. You can hardly turn on the telly or the radio now without being asked: Was Enoch right? But why, after years of polite neglect, is the media tacking the subject now? My theory? As Omaar concluded, people's fears are now economic not racial, which makes them “acceptable” to liberal commissioning editors.

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