Ill health seems almost as popular a subject for TV programmes as cookery, houses or the police. As well as voyeuristic documentaries like Channel Five's The World's Heaviest Man, there are hospital dramas galore - and multiplying. The BBC's Casualty has been running since 1986 and has already had spin-offs called Holby City and Holby Blue. More recently we had Casualty 1906, which back-dated Casualty by a century. Now here's a three-part series called Casualty 1907 (BBC1).

The first episode of the new series showed the appalling conditions in early 20th-century hospitals, years before the arrival of antibiotics and the NHS. Like other hospital series, it included plenty of sexual tension as well as some gruesomely bloody scenes of operations. As in most other period dramas on television, the actors behaved too informally and the script was careless about anachronisms. Would a uniformed nurse have smoked a cigarette in public in 1907? And did people at that time really use expressions like 'liaise', 'clobber' (for clothes), 'crown jewels' (slang for testicles) and 'I don't give a stuff'? One doctor even anticipated by more than 30 years an ITMA catchphrase: "Don't mind if I do".

The English Surgeon (BBC2) was much more worthwhile, not only because it was true but it was considerably more moving. It featured Henry Marsh, a brain surgeon who has been visiting the Ukraine for the last 15 years to assist voluntarily at a woefully under-resourced hospital near Kiev. We watched him struggling with multiple dilemmas: if operating will make a patient worse rather than better; if he should tell a young patient that she is going to go blind and die within a few years. And he has to operate with primitive equipment - like the household drill (with a faulty battery) which he uses to bore into a man's skull to remove a tumour. This could all have been depressing but it was inspiring because Marsh and his Ukrainian colleague Igor manage to give people hope as well as often curing them. And, as Henry says: "What are we if we don't try to help others? Nothing at all."

I'm surprised that Dan Cruickshank is still apparently healthy after puffing his way Around the World in 80 Treasures back in 2005. Now he's off again - in Dan Cruickshank's Adventures in Architecture (BBC2), an eight-part series in which he visits buildings that he didn't happen to see last time. The cruel producer sends him traipsing to Greenland (to watch an igloo being built), China, Russia, India and France. Dan drags in a message about global warming undermining some of the buildings but one presumes he used a polluting aircraft to reach these widespread destinations. The theme of the first programme was 'Beauty' but the Chinese Buddha sculpted out of rock was dominating rather than beautiful, while Albi Cathedral in France looked forbidding, fulfilling its aim of intimidating the populace.

I felt positively sick watching The Human Spider (Channel 4) - not because of the awesome exploits of its subject (Alain Robert, a man who climbs skyscrapers without artificial aids) but because the camera wouldn't keep still. I wanted to watch Alain close-up, to see how he actually clung on to the buildings, but instead the camera jumped continually from brief, distant shots of Alain to film of onlookers and policemen. It was virtually unwatchable.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King. His message lingers on, although people (especially governments) take insufficient notice of it. Martin Luther King: American Prophet (BBC2) had Oona King travelling around the US, asking why "King's faith is in danger of being written out of the story". She kept asking why Martin's Christian belief tends to be neglected but this is a misleading question and, in a way, irrelevant. Certainly King was a strong believer but he was important primarily because his philosophy of love, equality and nonviolence potentially appealed to everyone - not only Christians.