We've had months of 'whodunit?' speculation as we waited to find out who would murder Tina McIntyre in Coronation Street.

But in the end, she fell to her death after a little push from Rob during an argument. Hardly murder.

She fell from a balcony we had never, ever seen before - who knew such things existed in Weatherfield? Why weren't they out there all the time, sipping their cocktails in the rain?

Tina certainly looked a goner as she lay on the cobbles, but she might not quite be dead yet. Remember, people can fall from great heights in Corrie and survive.

Serial killer John Stape jumped from the hospital roof and managed to get up and run away.
Sophie fell from the church spire but was soon walking again.
Jim McDonald appeared to be paralysed after falling from scaffolding during a fight with Steve, but amazingly the healing powers of Weatherfield General saw him right as rain before long.

At least we found out straight away that Rob was (partly) to blame for Tina's demise, and they're not making us wait a ridiculous 10 months for the conclusion like EastEnders are with Lucy's murder.

Many programmes were like a cracker which failed to go bang, which promised much but which contained no party hat or joke.

Doctor Who and Downton Abbey, hailed as the jewels of Christmas Day viewing, were the worst offenders in my book.

The last 10 minutes of Doctor Who, with Matt Smith regenerating into Peter Capaldi, were gripping. But to get there we had to endure an hour of frankly frustrating gibberish.

Could anyone totally understand what was going on with the crack in the wall, a Mexican stand-off in a town called Christmas and the Papal Mainframe? And how did they get around the 'we've already regenerated 12 times' conundrum? By saying 'to hell with the rules', it seems.

Steven Moffat is getting very repetitive, not least in his titles - the last episode was called The Day of the Doctor, this one The Time of the Doctor. What next, The Leap Year of the Doctor?

I only hope that Capaldi's arrival will herald some fresh thinking and a return to self-contained episodes with plots we can understand.

But as a Christmas special, this was nowhere near as good as others we've seen. Remember Kylie Minogue as a waitress on the Titanic, or Dervla Kirwan as a brilliantly evil baddie, or vicious snowmen and a tuxedoed Sontaran. Now that's what I call a Christmas cracker.

Similarly, Downton Abbey was a huge let-down. They treated us to a magical Christmas episode two years ago, when Matthew proposed to Lady Mary in the snow.

Last year's put a downer on Christmas by killing off Matthew, but at least it was eventful. Hardly anything happened in this year's snoozefest.

It was far too long at two hours, with not enough plot to fill it out. They brought in two brilliant American actors in Paul Giamatti and Shirley MacLaine, yet wasted their talents. They should have been in far more scenes.

Nice frocks, but not nearly enough substance.

In the olden days, we saw normal people on TV all the time. They were contestants on game shows like The Generation Game, Mr and Mrs and Family Fortunes, making us laugh with their quirks.

But now The Generation Game no longer exists and almost every game or panel show has to involve famous faces. Hence we have All Star Mr and Mrs, involving celebrity couples, and All Star Family Fortunes.

We don't have game shows like Ask The Family, we have celebrity panel shows like Have I Got News For You, Mock The Week, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and 8 Out of 10 Cats.
Ordinary people can't go into the jungle, it has to be I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!

Yet ordinary people often make the best television, which is what Channel 4's Gogglebox has proved.
Who knew that watching people watching telly would be so hilarious and moving?

I love almost all of the people taking part, although my favourites have to be Leon and June, the retired teachers from Liverpool. They talk sense - or at least Leon does most of the time, and when he doesn't June will give us a few good eye rolls to show her disapproval.

I also like the posh couple Stephanie and Dom. It's very sweet the way they sit on the sofa holding hands, while grasping very large drinks in their free hands.

I just hope the fame doesn't go to their heads and they turn into celebrities too. Because what makes them so special is their very ordinariness and the fact they say what we're all thinking.

The final episode of Poirot was a triumph of acting, if rather bleak.

It was so sad to say 'au revoir' to Hercule in his last ever case, Curtain. Particularly as he and Hastings looked so old and frail - although it turned out Poirot wasn't quite as infirm as he was pretending. The old goat still had some tricks up his sleeve, including the shocking moment when he revealed he was wearing a false moustache. Zut alors!

Well done David Suchet for playing Agatha Christie's detective so sublimely for 24 years. I doubt anyone could better your performance.

One point though - I can't help thinking it was rather spoiled by the continuity announcer speaking over the end credits. More consideration should be given to when to break into our thoughts at such times.

You don't need to be a genius to work out why. Strictly knows it has a great formula and doesn't need to change it. The X Factor, however, was looking very tired last year, so they decided to make several alterations in format this time, very few of which have worked.

In fact, replacing Tulisa with Sharon Osbourne is about the only good thing about this series.

I also like the fact they've returned to simple 'room' auditions, but then why bother also having arena auditions? Especially when the judges seemed to take no notice of how contestants performed. Several who had done well at their first auditions were put through despite lousy and flat singing in the arena. These auditions seemed completely superfluous, just a way of getting more advertising revenue on a Sunday night by dragging the whole process out.

But the worst change has definitely been to the Bootcamp rounds. These used to be one of my favourite bits, when contestants were forced to sing together in groups, huddling in corridors and falling out. There was nothing Bootcamp about what they were put through at the weekend, as they only had to sing once.

The round turned into the most cruel version of musical chairs. "Congratulations, you're in my final six!" said the judges, inviting successful candidates to sit on one of the white plastic chairs.
Only to then say, a few minutes later, "Only joking! I lied, because I'm replacing you with someone else."

What a nasty way to play with people's emotions! And it wasn't even entertaining to watch, just rather upsetting and even quite repetitive and boring.

The worst thing is, we still have to go through the Judges' Houses round, which means even more indecision and tears and dragging out the results - "I've made my decision.....I'm sorry to say....you're going to have to come back because you're through!"

I'll still watch, of course, but X Factor has lost its appeal for me, whereas Strictly is still a feelgood, sparkling TV highlight.

I'm talking about tans. No-one seems too bothered about continuity now, so we get the ridiculous situation where Sally in Coronation Street goes into her house looking pale, and five minutes later comes out looking just a shade lighter than David Dickinson.

Soap stars never used to be allowed to get really brown if they went on holiday, because it would be highly distracting on their return. But those rules seem to have gone out the window.

Of course, some characters are brown all year round, thanks to fake tan. Tina McIntyre is one such culprit, which made the comment that she was looking pale when pregnant simply ridiculous.

It's time to tone down those tans, people.

Peter Capaldi was finally unveiled as the new Doctor Who, which I am pleased about because I think he'll be great in the role, bringing it gravitas and emotion. Though probably no Malcolm Tucker swearing, which is a shame. He'd put the fear of god into any monsters with his hairdryer dressing downs.

But the announcement came as no surprise. There had been so much money placed on Capaldi that bookmakers, who had him as their outright favourite for a week, suspended betting a few days ago.

So someone at the BBC had clearly blabbed, because his is not the obvious name for people to think up on their own.

The way he was announced was, frankly, rather embarrassing. A half-hour OTT plug for the show, full of people like Stephen Hawking telling us why Doctor Who was such a great programme.
And comedian Rufus Hound making a right fool of himself getting all his facts wrong. Why was he there in the first place?

It would have been far more exciting if we had discovered who the new Doctor was when he actually appeared in the show, when Matt Smith regenerates into him. Now that's what I call a reveal.

He will grow up with two sets of supportive grandparents to spoil and guide him. It seems inconceivable to most people that a child would not meet or know anything about their granny and granddad.

But that's exactly what happened to Una Stubbs, as we discovered in a fascinating start to a new series of Who Do You Think You Are.

Her grandmother Annie Stubbs died when Una was 23, but she never knew her or anything about her. Annie and Arthur were her father's parents and it seems they probably didn't get on with her mother, who sounds like a bit of a snob.

I find it odd that Una never questioned why she wasn't allowed to know her relatives or even their names. But Una is so sweet that she chose to put a positive spin on things, suggesting that perhaps Annie was "too colourful" and that her mother found her father's family "overwhelming".

That's a very nice way of explaining what I see as a cruel act. No wonder Una began crying only 11 minutes in, as she learned about Annie giving birth to an illegitimate baby at 18 in the workhouse.

The programme revealed a few extraordinary coincidences. Una discovered that Arthur had worked at the Rowntree chocolate factory in York - where Una visited because she was the Dairy Box girl.

When Arthur was made redundant, he moved to Welwyn Garden City, which just happened to have been founded by her mother's grandfather Sir Ebenezer Howard.

It was lovely to see how proud Una was of her relatives. What a shame she had to reach the age of 76 before she found out about them.

Who Do You Think You Are continues to entertain, inform and tug at our heart strings. Well done.

Actually, when they weighed what they cut away from poor Wesley Warren Jr, it came up as just shy of nine and a half stone, but that's not such a snappy title.

I could understand why people watched this documentary - it's like a car crash, it's horrible but we just can't tear our eyes away. Plus, we wanted to know the fate of Wesley, a decent bloke with a dry sense of humour, cursed with a medical anomaly and a bureaucratic health care system which didn't allow him to be treated outside his state.

What I can't understand is why Wesley wanted to go on television and have millions of people make jokes about him on Twitter. He knows he's a "living and breathing freak show" - his words - so why agree to be filmed? His condition was way worse than anything we've seen on Embarrassing Bodies.

It made me feel very uncomfortable watching it and the operation was a real ordeal to witness, even when the nursing staff starting playing with his testicles as they posed for a picture.

But the transformation was amazing. Now Wesley gets to wear trousers instead of an upside-down hoddie, and that really is amazeballs.

Planet Earth Live involved Richard Hammond in Africa in the dark, with no animals in sight, having to rely on footage they'd filmed earlier in daylight.

And BBC2's Heathrow Live is much the same. We know it can be an interesting place, but you'd never know that from this series. It made me long for the characters from Airport - remember Jeremy Spake?

Instead we got an over-excited Kate Humble saying 'wow' a lot and stupid things like "Air Traffic Control is a pretty complicated matter". Just a bit, Kate.

She was thrilled to be part of the first live camera team allowed in an air traffic control tower, but there didn't seem much point. She made the cameraman show us an empty table where they had once been doughnuts. "Fascinating stuff," as Kate kept repeating.

As in other 'live' programmes, they had to fill out the show with lots of pre-recorded films so it really wasn't that live after all. And it was a big plug for Singapore Airlines.

Channel 4's Terror in the Skies was far more interesting. It showed mobile phone footage of a man going mad on a plane, shouting about Iraq and how the plane had to go down. He was restrained, but the terrifying thing was that he was the pilot.

There's not a normal one among them. The most ordinary, an Irish postman called Michael, turns out to be an actor and a mole. Though not a very good one, as his first act was to choose that all his fellow housemate suitcases be shredded, which a real contestant trying to be popular would never do.

The most ridiculous housemate is Wolfy, whose name is the least odd thing about her. She's a Mancunian lesbian who's moved to Cornwall to be a fisherwoman. She has a tattoo of a mackerel in a top hat on her leg and is also a shamen. Of course she is! It's as if the contestants are now selected by random generator.

Glamour girl Sallie, with the excess of side boobage, thinks the Big Brother house has never had a tattooed opinionated girl before. Really? Have you not watched it?

Then came self-proclaimed gold digger Jemima, who thinks she looks good for her age. You don't, love.

Smarmy womaniser Callum said "look out ladies" in a way which sounded like a threat.

Annoying twins Jack and Joe make me long for Jedward.

By far the worst housemate so far is obnoxious Dexter, who declared: "I don't just make the headlines, I also break the headlines." What does that mean? He's proud of having spent £121,000 in one night on Champagne and is so full of himself that you just want to slap him.

The nicest guy seems to be Sam, though no-one is allowed to be ordinary. Sam's USP is that he's deaf. He's odds-on to win at the moment, probably because he's the least freaky of this bunch of show-off misfits.

But there is one good thing about this year's series - the replacement, finally, of Brian Dowling with a proper presenter. Emma Willis was looking great on the launch show and can ask proper questions. Though "Why would you want to put yourself through this nonsense?" strangely wasn't one of them.

Featuring a classy cast and sharp writing, it started very well with a great episode with widow Will Mellor trying dating again and having the misfortune to meet spikey Celeste/Mia (Oona Chaplin).

She stood him up at first because he was wearing a tie with jeans that made him "look like a Belgian".
He gave his real name, David, but pretended to be a lawyer when he was really a lorry driver, though one who managed to see through Mia.

Next up came Sheridan Smith as a secret kleptomaniac and Neil Maskell as a nasty sexist homophobic but secretly gay drunk, who thankfully got his comeuppance.

The best episodes have been with forthright Mia, who enjoyed making smarmy doctor Stephen squirm in the third episode. He's played by Ben Chaplin, no relation to Oona - or at least I would hope not, judging by what they were doing in an alley.

More vulnerable than she made out, she freely admitted she was a "retired escort", adding "you however are still a member of the d***heads".

Dates is something different and refreshing and I've already made a date to watch next week's installments.

There are almost as many documentaries about dirt than about gypsy weddings and hospitals. The latest is the ITV series Dirty Britain, which lured me in with the programme details that it was going to be about the cleaners of posh Cheshire mansions.

We did catch a glimpse of these £4 million properties, but not find out who they belonged to or anything especially interesting. Just that they contain a lot of marble and glass, their kitchens are so empty that clearly nobody cooks, and the baths are so big that the women have to get in them to clean them.

But we only stuck on one subject for a couple of minutes before racing on to the next, in a real hotchpotch of a show that shoehorned in a dry cleaners and a Blackpool hotel.

Few people were interesting, with the exception of Sammy the cheerful London street sweeper who took pride in his job.

Most were not at all revealing. Loo of the Year awarder Richard told us "People need to go to the toilet several times a day." You don't say!

We learned that Britain's landfill sites cover the size of Warwickshire and we dump six million mattresses a year, but I could have really done without the mucky stuff - seeing pigeon and rat droppings up close and Sammy discussing clearing up vomit on the street.

"It's not very nice, is it?" said a cleaner at one point. Nope, it's not, and that's why I won't be watching again.

The Game of Thrones finale felt like a damp squib, with not a lot actually happening, but then most of us are still in shock from last week's Red Wedding episode.

More frustrating was The Fall, which ended without any resolution and left me feeling short-changed.

After five loooooong hours - at times it was terrifying tense, but it's also been too slow - our cool detective Stella Gibson wasn't much nearer to catching serial killer Paul Spector than at the start.

It has featured mesmerising performances from Gillian Anderson and Jamie Doran, but we deserved a better conclusion than this open-ended finale.

Now we will have to wait at least a year for the second series, which is far too long. This is a poor way to treat viewers.

This was easily the worst Britain's Got Talent show I've ever seen. Amateurishly put together - come on guys, turn on the microphones so we can hear the acts - and chaotic in parts, such as after the first bizarre act. Martin Healy, who'd dressed as a vicar to dance with a broom, as you do, seemed drunk as he talked over the judges.

Not that the judges were making much sense. They thought everything was 'fantastic!' when it clearly wasn't. Maybe Amanda Holden was too distracted by her own huge hair and curtains-for-a-dress.

Most of the acts seemed overcome by nerves. I wanted to like impressionist Philip Green, but his material was rubbish. Little Arisxander was at least not singing about one night stands again, but she sounded flat. Even Ant and Dec, normally so naturally funny, seemed like they were trying too hard to convince us how great the show was.

There were far too many ads, but then the breaks came as a relief.

I liked the final act, Richard and Adam, but having to wait 90 minutes for them was torture. Amanda said people would be in tears at home, which was going far too far, unless they were tears of frustration.

And the worst thing? We have four more nights of this. You'd better up your game, BGT.