On the box with Aidan Smith

SCOTT & BAILEY

STV Sunday, 9pm

ANNIE NIGHTINGALE: BIRD ON THE WIRELESS

BBC4 Friday, 9pm

BIG enough to be seen from space, said Andrew Marr, and, no, the esteemed presenter wasn't talking about his ears. The clue was in the title of his new series, Andrew Marr's Mega-injunctions. I'm sorry, I'll read that again: Andrew Marr's Megacities.

A megacity has a population of ten million-plus. There are 21 of them in the world and Marr is concentrating on five. "I'll climb the mighty fingers of the metropolis," he vowed, and in London, gazing from the cockpit of the crane alongside The Shard, which is growing to becoming Europe's mightiest at 1,016ft, the bold Andra thought he'd made it. Not quite. The hard hats are set to go twice as high again. This is called jumping the crane and it's the most dangerous feat in all construction. Said John: "There's always a handshake before we let the bolts go."

In Tokyo, largest of the megacities, pop: 33 million, Marr encountered a mechanical coldness, an unsettling robotic unity, and his unease was hardly helped by his dwelling, all contained within a narrow corridor running round a tall building: "the shaving of a flat", he called it.

Tokyo can be mega-lonely but they've devised a solution. "You can rent people," revealed Marr, his voice jumping the crane with anticipation.

Uh-oh, Andra, are you sure? Not for sex, simply for friendship. He hooked up with Uhay, who's hired by solitary drones to laugh at their jokes in the pub after work to impress colleagues. "How sad," said our host, then the two worst golfers in Tokyo tried to out-sclaff each other at a practice range atop a skyscraper.

Dhaka was more to Marr's liking, even though the slumdogs all seemed to agree that their guest was a dead-ringer for Mr Bean. He also enjoyed Mexico City, despite its murders and kidnappings and the hazards posed by killer grannies: amorous ladies of a certain age who'd interrupt his pieces-to-camera demanding he dance with them. Surrounded, Andra wailed: "I've got too many friends!" This reminded me of one of Alan Whicker's encounters with the recently-widowed when the great globetrotter quipped: "They've gone quite blonde with shock." Marr couldn't quite come up with a line worthy of Whicker but I'm enjoying his series, so much so that since he was oddly cheered by the sight of rollerbladers taking over London's streets on his return home, I'm giving him a joke. What's the hardest thing about rollerblading? Telling your father you're gay.

Scott & Bailey, what are they selling? It sounds suspiciously like houses. I'm no fan of home shows, which irritates my wife to the extent she won't give me the credit for the nickname I use for Kirstie Allsopp – Lady Aga. Anyway, it turns out Scott & Bailey are crimebusters, like we're short of them.

The, er, twist this time is they're both women with a female superior and that it's the men in the cop-shop, so far at least, who are playing the poorly drawn characters in the background. Lesley Sharp is Cagney and Suranne Jones is Lacey (you know what I mean). I like these actresses, also Amelia Bullmore, funny in the recent TwentyTwelve, and so decided to give the first instalment a go. "Two years of my life wasted," fumed Bailey near the end. This was an exaggeration. Minus the ad break, it came in at about 48 minutes. But, yes, pretty lame.

Actually, the secret life of Bailey's boyfriend (wife, kids, nice house far enough away from their shag-pad) was pretty intriguing. More so than the murder under investigation, which surely rates as a flaw in a policer. And you were left wondering how Bailey ever cracks any cases if for two years she can be blithely ignorant of being strung along. "What happened to Barcelona?" she simpered during the break-up dinner. As lovelorn lines go it wasn't a patch on "We'll always have Lumphinnans".

The subject of Annie Nightingale: Bird On The Wireless had to fight hard to become Radio 1's first female DJ, having initially been told that jocks had to be male to fulfil the function of husband substitutes, then when she got on air in 1970, being made to feel like a woman driver whose first dead-air blooper was keenly anticipated. But while her passion for music remains undimmed (the Beatles to dubstep via punk and acid house and also King Crimson, and I can't tell you how happy I am to be giving them a second mention on these pages in a fortnight), we learned frustratingly little about the woman behind the midnight raver's parched voice, save for how she once ran off to Brighton with someone who was married.

This article was originally published in Scotland on Sunday on June 5th 2011