Actresses may complain that there are few meaty, marrow-sucky, chin-dribbly, breast-beatingly stentorian parts for them on the stage and big screen - just a catwalk of pulchritudinous assistants, mistresses, nurses, mothers and ironically feminist chief executives, inspectors and judges. Generally, they’re just plot devices with breasts. Not on television. There, dramatic life is turned upside down, topsy-turvy, and it’s the women who get on topsy. In costume dramas, they’re the pathetic nubility; as spies and police, in medical dramas, sitcoms and soaps, they are all equal. Newsreaders, weathercasters, reality presenters and enthusing estate agents are all just as likely to be women as men. It’s because drama’s commissioning editors are generally women, and the people who run independent production companies are like-minded women.

Alone in all the supposedly liberal and progressive arts, television puts women in charge, allows them to stand at the urinal of opportunity with the men. Actresses are just as likely to be the marquee stars of a TV drama production. Just closing my eyes and making a list, I can come up with more women on television than men that I’d make a date to stay in and see. From Juliets to nurses, TV has the best repertory company of women performers of any performing medium. But here’s the odd thing. I haven’t noticed much discernible change in the stereotypical emotional narrative formats of television. It is still conflict-driven, an aggressive, suspense-plotted place, with the disembodied masculine imperatives of revenge and righteous denouement.

Perhaps the reason for this is that the writing on television’s glass wall is still mainly done by men, which may also be the reason that the standard of scripts on television, both dramatic and factual, is pretty dire - a comfy series of familiar setups and payoffs, salted with humour and pathos, that drift across the screen with all the excitement of an afternoon nap.

Much of this came together in The Long Walk to Finchley (Thursday, BBC4), the imagined early life of Margaret Thatcher, part of television’s coy fascination with unreal life. It started as an annoying script that was both pedestrianly episodic and bound up in dreary lists of diary facts, while at the same time giving itself licence to run off and be facetiously whimsical. All its dramatic assumptions were shrill, frail and gossipy. It lacked any sense of portent or destiny. It didn’t have the courage of its own convictions. It was neither Brutus nor Mark Antony. Presumably, the point of depicting Thatcher’s early years was to in some way illuminate the later years, to cast an opinion, have a point of view. But all this did was snigger and flash its hindsight at 1950s Tories, who are hardly a difficult target. There was no insight to the drama, no hint of what was to come. Why did they bother?

Then I was pleased they had, because of an astonishing performance, by Andrea Riseborough. She tacked a nerve-wracking line between caricature and impersonation. Despite the soggy script, and with precious little help from the direction, editing, camerawork or the rest of the cast, she contrived to be strangely obsessive and compulsive, grabbing a collection of tics and mannerisms, verbal riffs, rhythms and rhymes, awkward attitudes and stances that formed not so much a character as an audition to become a character. And it was strangely and perceptively what we remembered to be true about the later Thatcher. She never seemed to have a natural movement in her body or an unstrained consonant in her mouth. She had made herself up as she went along, a totem-pole woman.

On the screen, Riseborough’s performance was so odd and misshapen, it was almost animatronic, like watching a pterodactyl learn to be a person. But with all the awkwardness, it was a brilliantly observed truth about its subject, and about women who try to manipulate themselves into politics. It was a riveting, triumphant unmade bed of a performance, by another actress who has gone straight onto the list of women who mustn’t be missed. Nothing else about this production was worth the electricity it took to broadcast.

Richard Burton, the other one, is best known for his African expeditions to find the source of the Nile, and for his subsequent tragic falling out with his partner, Speke, whom he bullied to suicide. In his lifetime, however, Burton was notorious as a sexual libertine, a proto-anthropologist, a brilliant linguist, translator, orientalist and outsider. You could make a case for him being the first instinctive existentialist. He was, beyond everything, a gargantuan adventurer of a style and type that simply couldn’t exist today, because the world is no longer the sandpit and bordello of white men with moustaches. Burton must be one of the most exciting men to read about and one of the most disturbingly unpleasant to share a tent with. His life beggars any of the quaint, quiet travellers and gap-year exhibi-tionists who inhabit our foreign-travel TV. You would have thought the louche actor Rupert Everett would be the last person you’d want to see following in Burton’s footsteps, but then you’d be more wrong than about anything else you’ve been wrong about in all your tediously wrong life, and that is the joy of being surprised and shocked by television.

It is in the nature of a good adventure that you don’t know where you’re going or who’s taking you.

In The Victorian Sex Explorer (Monday, C4), Everett concentrated on the orientalism and the translation of The Perfumed Garden, culminating with Burton’s trip to the closed city of Mecca. He travelled through eunuchs’ brothels and Egyptian gay massage parlours, and most blissfully sang How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria with a mother superior in a convent in India. It was a compelling journey, and rather a brave one. Everett is an accomplished, witty and observant presenter with a winning mixture of narcissism and self-deprecation, camp observation and clever, informed deduction. The programme looked unctuously dishevelled and had the authentic whiff of the caprice and demons that must have driven Burton himself. It is a truth both in the real world and the glass box that the least likely mountebanks make the most exciting companions. I hope Everett will be convinced to do more of these. He has a natural affinity for travellers’ tales.

My preview disc of Brothers and Sisters in Love (Thursday, ITV1) came with “strictly embargoed until after broadcast” printed on it. This invariably fills the critic with a deep-brown gloom, guaranteeing an hour’s knuckle-chewing ennui. Oh that, just for once, they would heed their own glib exclamations and embargo themselves before broadcasting. This was a timid and uneventful rubberneck at sibling incest, about as entertaining as eavesdropping in a social-services waiting room. To Shaw’s often repeated advice that we should try everything once except incest and folk dancing, I might add “documentaries about incest and folk dancing”. I wonder whether there might not be a new reality talent show here, about incestuous folk dancing, called I Doodle-Oodle-Diddly-I-A Anyone.

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