Coronation Street

ITV1

It's Ozzy we should be worried about. Ever since Tony and Maria entered their totally implausible, weird pregnancy fan club arrangement, Liam's black lab has had to hold his bark. Ozzy is the last remaining tribune to dead Liam and therefore supernaturally aware of Tony's villainy. He doesn't immediately run back to him with pieces of driftwood or obey commands. But like Maria maybe he is softening: his tail has been seen to wag traitorously while Tony has been in residence as Maria's birthing partner. When Tony offered to take him for a walk a few weeks ago, fans screamed “Noooo”. Would Ozzy come back? Tony is Coronation Street's current psychopath. He murdered Liam, Maria's husband, for having an affair with his true love Carla. The saintly Maria correctly accused Tony of the crime, but was deemed mad. In a switch of storyline many of us are still scratching our heads over, she is now in love with, and dependent on him. Carla is due to come back, though. Oh goody.

Maria has been very pregnant for a very long time. Her neighbour Eileen recommended that she go for a long walk to encourage contractions. Maria, defying every soap convention, said she wanted fate “to grab me... and give me a great big sloppy kiss”. Foolish woman. Another golden rule of soap is that as soon as you leave your immediate surroundings, danger awaits. Recall Rita running in gold mac, with amnesia, from Alan Bradley on Blackpool seafront? Fate doesn't kiss you sloppily in soaps, it delivers pain.

In this distinctly frisky episode, Kevin and Molly revelled in their adultery in front of a fridge full of butter, while on a windswept faraway beach Tony and Maria mulled lines from The Walrus and the Carpenter, and Maria didn't correct a dog-walker who mistook Tony for her husband. She secretly likes the idea. As Maria went into labour, worryingly - and will you, like me, be watching this far more closely than the labour itself? - Tony let go of Ozzy's lead as he ran back to Maria. Where has Ozzy gone? Why am I filled with such foreboding for Ozzy? And how will Maria be, not being pregnant?

Martina Cole's The Take

Sky1

If you half-feared an hour of ends being tied (that's loose bits of twine around the neck) in as murderous and operatic fashion as possible, Martina Cole's The Take didn't disappoint. This deliriously silly drama was spun out far too long, wasting the talents of a brilliant cast, who somehow just by snivelling, threatening and crying that bit more classily than their scrappy gangland source material demanded made it work.

A murderous toddler killed his brother, or half-brother, as he jealously identified that his lying, cheating, murdering dad, Freddie (Tom Hardy), loved him more than his brother. This was chewed over for an age: wifey Kierston Wareing was made to sob and sob (as she has been required to do throughout), her sister (Charlotte Riley) stabbed Hardy in the neck with a pair of scissors. And Riley's husband, played by Shaun Evans (well he tortured people but was nice), made a chicken curry at the end. This mad, ranging oddity, which was Lock, Stock without the necessary serrated edge, reached port, with its passengers none the wiser as to why the bloody journey had taken so bloody long. Hardy and his fellow actors valiantly saved it from total turkey-dom.

Nasa: Triumph and Tragedy

BBC Two

The second part of the more plainly and indisputably brilliant Nasa: Triumph and Tragedy began with Aldrin and Armstrong's “one small step” journey to the Moon and progressed through the dramas of Apollo 13, two shuttle disasters (in 1986 and 2003) and the imminent retirement of the shuttle in 2010. There were heart-stopping, digitally restored shots of the first astronaut floating in space as he piloted a jet-pack. Despite the setbacks and loss of life, the urge to explore would remain, we were told gravely. That's why there's a £108 billion space station up there, which, somebody noted, was “big enough to find a quiet space by the window”.

The programme reminded you how magical and inspiring space exploration is (every story inspired frantic fingernail chewing), but it didn't investigate deeper, political issues. What role would Nasa have to play if the issue of space territory becomes more vexed? What if space becomes a commercialised travel zone? If space ceases to be the final frontier, what does Nasa do then? Does Nasa itself have a future?

The Da Vinci Shroud: Revealed

Channel 4

There were more unanswered questions in The Da Vinci Shroud: Revealed, which was another piece of fascinating analysis, this time of the complex history of the shroud (below), which was believed to be the outline of Jesus's body. That has long since been debunked; this programme sought to find out who created the fake.

Leonardo da Vinci was collared as the latest suspect: he had a great interest in anatomy, he had access to cadavers, he was originating theories around what would become known as camera obscura (one theory is that he created the shroud using a series of early photographic techniques), and another expert said that one of his early anatomical faces perfectly matched the face of the shroud. Apparently da Vinci's own face is a perfect match for the Mona Lisa, which - if true - makes the most famous painting in the world an extraordinary example of gender-bending narcissism. Cool!

After an hour of throwing question after question, thesis after thesis at us, it came to the best conclusion in these know-it-all times: we just don't know.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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