For all its right-here, right-now cool, I’m constantly amused by how obsessive-compulsive and geeky the new technology of omnipresent entertainment is. For instance, the iTunes system I’m listening to as I write this can’t help itself: it has to arrange all music into overlapping and interlocking lists, like some sad old vinyl-sniffing hippie. There are categories for every form of music: rock, classical, alternative, world and, bizarrely, French pop - a slim selection. And then, between “soundtrack” and “vocal”, there is a slot for “unclassifiable”, where even the might of the fathomless internet throws up its hands and gives in. I just looked into mine: it is a sad little musical refugee huddle of lost choirs. It’s all choral music - hymns, carols, plainsong liturgy, chants Gregorian and tribal. And I sort of know what the iTunes system means. There is something about choral singing that defies definition and description. The collective power of voices can physically tug the breath from your chest, cloud the eyes and put a lump the size of Gibraltar in your throat.

Or choral music can sound like Last Choir Standing (BBC1, Saturday). I have been orally immobilised by the breadth, invention and minutely crafted godawfulness of the arrangements, harmonics and twinkie descants in this spellbinding competition. What is so marvellously compelling is that there are quite so many teenagers and students out there who are publicly willing to give up any possible hope of a sex life or respect to live with the ridicule and revulsion of their peers, simply to take part in performing this wall of kitsch. What Strictly Come Dancing is to dancing, Last Choir Standing is to singing — and, indeed, standing.

The continuing story of a megalomaniac desperate to found a dynasty, whose paranoia turns a court and a family into a stew of fear, resentment, plots and suspicion: The Tudors (Friday, BBC2) are back for more. In my lifetime, Henry VIII has gone from being Keith Michell to Ray Winstone and now Jonathan Rhys Meyers, proving history is pretty much whatever you need it to be. The story of Henry’s profligate misuse of wives was once all about heredity; now it’s all about sex. The Tudors have gone from Burke’s Peerage to Mills & Boon, and Rhys Meyers is definitely the chick-hist choice. Personally, I find him hard to believe as a renaissance prince, creator of a new religion and the man who oversaw the greatest metamorphosis in the social, political and cultural life of a nation, dragging England out of the Middle Ages into the light of reason. In fact, despite the amount of swyving he does, I have trouble seeing him as a heterosexual: there’s just too much smouldering, pouting and peck-flexing for him to be straight. It’s all trying too hard, and he's too camp. But there’s a bigger character problem for The Tudors, possibly the biggest character problem known to historical drama, a catastrophic part malfunction: Sam Neill.

I assume Neill is in this thing because his agent has photographs of the producers in a safe, or perhaps because Americans want to see at least one face they recognise. Neill’s presence makes this Tudorassic Park. Now, I have a large and squidgy soft spot for him: he is about as far away from being an actor as it’s possible to be and appear on screen at the same time. He has really only one expression, a look of worried incomprehension, as if his face were trying to fathom how on earth it managed to end up in front of a camera yet again. It’s a look he shares with his audience. Neill’s career arc is proof, not only that lightning can strike twice, but that it can strike repeatedly without ever illuminating anything. It was a pleasure to watch him stumble through the lines as if they were an Urdu shopping list, bereft of punctuation, and regard the rest of the cast with the groggy incomprehension of a man coming round from minor surgery in a room full of someone else’s relatives.

The enduring curse of the Tudors — and, indeed, quite a few of the Stuarts — is that, despite living in the most rollicking, murderous, passionate and attractive period in English history, their clothes were utterly naff and completely ridiculous. How on earth did those titans of testosterone and derring-do allow themselves to be kitted out in baggy nappies with willie pouches and tights, beanbag shoes, bolero jackets and Worzel Gummidge hats — or, worse, big dressing gowns with mad-granny jewellery? This production sensibly dispenses with any historical accuracy and kits out everybody like a cross between a Dutch brothel and Star Wars. In fact, to get the full benefit of The Tudors, don’t think of it as a historical costume drama at all, but as camp science fiction with a wooden dinosaur.

And now on to the continuing story of a megalomaniac desperate to found a dynasty, whose paranoia turns his court and family into a stew of resentment, plots and suspicion: Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in Iraq. The first thing you notice about House of Saddam (Wednesday, BBC2) is that it suffers the same style black hole as The Tudors. The Middle Eastern take on western clothes in the 1980s was really not a good look, a cross between Dynasty and Leeds United Football Club. This, though, is a good idea for a drama series: plenty of plot - and plots - lots of action and darkly Websterish motivation.

The first episode was as flat as a Hotel Babylon Christmas special. To begin with, there are no sympathetic characters. The writers have been unable to construct, invent or discover a nice Iraqi, and for the tension to work we have to like someone and care about them. But here, everybody is treated as a “towel-head”, drawn with the same broad and simplistic racial stereotyping. You don’t care who gets tortured and hanged next. Saddam himself is nothing like bad enough. He’s just not enough of a monster; he’s more annoying than bad. Like a bland and predictable shop manager, he had none of the saturnine steeliness, the creepy lizard charm, the sense of murderous danger and mad self-belief that were apparent in all the newsreels. This series yearns to be treated like a marriage between The Sopranos and I, Claudius, but there isn’t much suspense. We all know how this ends. Sadly, it simply confirms the Dick Cheney view of foreign relations and international drama.

Carol Vorderman has left Countdown, the relentlessly limp daytime game show that has been a dead format running for years. It has gone on, episode after episode, without ever raising the heartbeat or troubling the thoughts of suicide in the long-term unemployed, technically disabled and clinically depressed who were its core viewers. If you find yourself watching three episodes of Countdown in a row, it is medical proof that your life has actually, definitely, reached the bottom.

Vorderman slid numbers into a rack as a career; she was, to all intents and purposes, the knife-thrower’s assistant, but without the excitement, the dress sense or, sadly, the knives. Now she’s not going to do it any more, why does anybody care? Do I care? Do I look like I care? EFILATEG.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette