I’ve never been quite sure whether Brian Eno is a musician, or somebody for whom music happens to be the end product of a chain of cognitive processes. Certainly it was music that powered him to prominence, either as the inventor of ambient music, a performer with Roxy Music, or as a collaborator with artists ranging from rock gods U2 and David Bowie to composers Harold Budd and Philip Glass.

Born out of the spurious Radio 4 phone-in show Down The Line, created by Fast Show veterans Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, Bellamy’s People takes bogus broadcaster Gary Bellamy out on the road and in front of the cameras to meet his public. On Radio 4 (before being unmasked as a spoof), Bellamy was bombarded with angry listeners decrying his sexism, racism and all-round witless stupidity.

Naturally it would be impossible to reach an objective verdict on what is the worst programme ever shown on television, but it is at least safe to say that Popstar To Operastar is determined not to get left behind in the race to the bottom. This could also be said of some of its contestants, whose unfamiliarity with the concept of "singing" seemed surprising in people who perform music for a living, albeit of the non-operatic kind.

Saturday evening's By The People - The Election of Barack Obama helpfully illustrated some timeless truths about the art of documentary film-making. Its co-authors, Amy Rice and Alicia Sams, had spent two years enjoying priceless backstage access to Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency, first as he saw off Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then during the Presidential campaign itself.

On Have I Got News for You, the world viewed through Paul Merton’s eyes is not quite as others see it. He makes the random connections of the lateral thinker, thinks jaggedly round corners, and competes manically to have the last word, the last laugh. He also likes you to know that he knows stuff. Last night Paul Merton went to Germany to make a documentary. He’d never been before. You rather fancied that Germany viewed through the Mertonian prism might come up looking a little different, perhaps even a little funnier. But no, I didn't laugh once.

If Gordon Brown had slipped and fallen on the ice this weekend you could have expected at least a dozen conspiracy theories to have emerged on the internet. Why was David Miliband spotted studying a weather map the night before? Why had the PM’s aides suggested that particular pavement? And who controls the gritting lorries anyway? The worldwide web is many things, and one of them is this festering, bottomless pit of paranoid conjecture – rich picking for a tough-minded series like BBC Two’s The Conspiracy Files, whose latest chosen subject was Osama Bin Laden.

For Horizon's fascinating investigation into the ancestral relationship between man and dog, a record-breaking number of illustrious boffins had been compressed into 60 minutes of television. We met Dr Anna Kukekova from Cornell University, who has been conducting research into which gene makes silver foxes (dogs by any other name) either tame or wild.

Perception was everything last night in Garfield Kennedy’s fascinating if, at times, frustrating documentary, The Trials of Amanda Knox. Was the American student who was convicted last month of murdering her British flatmate in Perugia, Meredith Kercher, a scheming hussy into (very) extreme sex games, or just an averagely adventurous twentysomething turned into a scapegoat by an Italian judiciary that had already convinced itself of her guilt? Kennedy’s film considered the evidence, and it also detailed the concomitant trial by the media - and there, to a degree, is a problem. Because this documentary is also “the media”, and Knox’s case (appeal pending) is not closed. Somewhat misleadingly, it could be argued, the film was screening in More4’s True Stories slot. But was this only the partial truth, with some added special pleading?