It could have been a statement of the bleedin' obvious: Jesus was Jewish. It could have been special pleading: why is Christianity so particularly nasty to Jews when it owes Judaism so much? It could have been a scatter of cheap shots: my son, the Messiah, the nice Jewish boy. Instead the novelist Howard Jacobson's take on Christ, the first of Channel 4's distinctly idiosyncratic eight-part history of Christianity, managed to be a brilliant polemic, a riveting history and a font of fresh thinking all at once.

My favourite expert witness called upon by Jacobson was Father Jerome Murphy O'Connor (cousin of the less interesting Cormac), who assured us that Luke had simply made up the story of the no-room-at-the-inn Nativity. Jesus's parents, he was sure, lived in Bethlehem and had ended up in the town of Nazareth in Galilee as refugees.

Having established Jesus's citizenship in Judah, Jacobson went on to provide modern archaeological evidence to dispute the theory that Galilean Jews were not really all that Jewish. No, he concluded, Jesus the Jew's ambition was to revive Judaism, not abolish it - a task taken upon himself instead by a deeply conflicted Jew whom Jesus had never met called St Paul. As for being the Messiah, Jesus failed to fulfil the Old Testament's demands for the title by neither liberating the Jews from Roman tyranny nor purifying them in readiness for that liberation. Christians skirt around this heroic failure by promising that all will be made good the second time round, in the Second Coming.

It is an indication of the state of divinity teaching in this country that most of this was new to me. But even Jacobson's learned interviewees seemed pleasantly surprised by the originality of Jacobson's perceptions. “That's a wonderful way of putting it,” said Dr Karen Maitland, of the Jewish Community of Lincoln, when told by her interviewer that Christianity's relationship with Judaism was Oedipal: a younger religion in terror of a cruel parent religion.

We were in Lincoln because in 1255, 18 Jews had been hanged on a trumped-up charge of drinking the blood of a missing eight-year-old called Hugh. As late as the last century, pilgrims would worship at the shrine of St Hugh. Lincoln Cathedral set the record straight only in 1955. Disturbing though the endurance of this nasty libel was, I was even more shocked that Jacobson concluded a tale of the massacre of 150 Jews in 1190 in York by saying only “a handful of Jews” live in York to this day. Indeed, I was so shocked that I checked the 2001 census for the city. It records that out of a population of 137,505, 0.12 per cent claim to be Jewish against an average for England and Wales of 0.5 per cent. Well, 165 is more than a handful but it is still remarkably few. Do Jews avoid York for fear of furtive St Hugh worship? Do synagogues hand out fact sheets listing towns where Jews are outnumbered two to one by Buddhists? Or is anti-Semitism so embedded in the West that we gentiles are unable to detect its background stench?

Alan Sugar's faith was one of the few areas not examined in a surprisingly intimate portrait of the Great Firer in yesterday's Money Programme, The Real Sir Alan. All the stories you have ever heard about Sugar are true: he really did, at least in times past, run his business in an environment of “terror”, he really does think women should be quizzed about their childcare arrangements before being hired, and he really did send his wife a birthday card signed “Best wishes, Alan Sugar”.

Sugar does not emote because, he explained, his parents (“quite miserable people”) never did, but it was hard not to feel sorry for a man who lost his touch for technological innovation some 15 years ago and has had to settle for becoming a “personality”. The presenter Fiona Bruce had fun playing a Sale of the Century hostess caressing his naff products of yesteryear, some of which, sadly, remained in production until quite recently. Bruce was charming when she wanted to be (tittering with mock fear when she took the joystick of his plane) and firm when she needed to be, which was quite often. I think she quite liked him. So do I.

I still quite like Demons. Saturday's episode began strongly with the spooky kidnapping of a child by an angel, was propped up in the middle by a cameo from Richard Wilson as a crazy old zombie and by the end had fallen apart as surely as the demon smote with young Luke's sword. The dialogue, the acting and even the slightly second-rate visual effects will ensure this show's success, unless its lazy plotting smites it. That ITV risked a tongue-in-cheek drama about a young girl's disappearance must mean, however, that the national anxiety over Madeleine McCann is easing. I just can't decide if that is a good or bad thing.

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