I liked Big Love, the HBO polygamy serial set in Utah. Five dumped it after series one, presumably because the world it depicted was just too alien for its viewers (as opposed to the worlds of CSI and Law & Order). Wait till they saw - which I am sure they did not - Four Wives, One Man, last night's documentary about an Iranian sheep farmer and his four spouses. This was about as alien as British television gets - but also as intimate. Over three years Nahid Persson, who made the much-acclaimed 2004 documentary Prostitution Behind the Veil, moved with freedom around the Mohammadi family, capturing every nuance of the wives' fights, resentments and gossip but also the help they gave one another to endure their marriages, even to the point, in one touching case, of handing over a baby to a wife who was barren.

In the lottery of life, being married to Heda Mohammadi is not a winning ticket. Farang, Goli, Shahpar and Ziba sometimes sang as they worked at their carpet weaving, bread-making and floor scrubbing, but the songs lyrics were in the vein of “I swapped my youth for old age/ But I got nothing in return”. A kind word, an occasional bonk was what they got from Heda at best, an ear bashing at second best, and a thrashing, sometimes with a hose, at worst. Nor was their mother-in-law an ally. Complain, complain, was all she did. Even she conceded that she was not a nice woman. “That's why God made me a cripple. My enemies delight in my misery.” But gran, at least, was an equal opportunity cow. “All my son thinks about is pussy,” she told us.

There must be good historical and economic reasons for polygamy in the Iranian desert, or else the Koran would not have excused it in the verse that prefaced the movie. But good reasons did not apply to Heda, a 50-year-old lothario with a tummy, 20 children and understandable financial problems. There are Hedas everywhere in this world. The lucky ones are in sex addiction clinics. Heda collected wives, but having bedded them and impregnated them, he tended to move on or - rather - not. At the end, he zoomed away on his motorbike and returned with a very young prize indeed. Ziba, wife four, threw her the front-door keys as wife five entered. “Heda's good- tempered, pleasant and sociable,” his bride enthused. Sure, go and ask the women of the house.

Secrets of the Jesus Tomb excavated a 27-year-old story you had probably heard before. It was the one about the tomb discovered in a Jerusalem suburb that contained ossuaries whose inscriptions, if you read them with enough imagination, read “Jesus, son of Joseph”, “Mary” and “Mary Magdalene”. With the aid of some sub-Zeffirelli re-enactments and pacy music, the programme spun a web of supposition. Maybe Christ married. Maybe he had a son. Maybe that son had curly red hair.

The programme displayed a surer mastery of the obvious. “One of the most famous figures in history,” the commentary explained about Jesus, “the truth about his life remains a mystery. But one thing is certain: Christ was not a Christian. Christianity only came into being after he died.” The conclusion that this feeble documentary more or less arrived at was something else obvious: the tomb probably wasn't Jesus's at all.

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