Aidan Smith's TV week: Anatomy of a Scandal (Netflix), Gerry Anderson: a Life Uncharted (Britbox), Julia (Sky Atlantic), Rock Family Trees (BBC2)

I’ve tried but can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t get Matt Hancock’s canoodling out of my head.

Sienna Miller in Anatomy of a Scandal

Anatomy of a Scandal was presumably filmed before CCTV cameras revealed the affair with an aide which ended his career as Health Secretary. With Neflix’s clout and Sienna Miller heading the cast, this drama probably doesn’t need the boost of any art-imitates-life in flagrante. Still, nice to have it all the same.

Miller is Sophie Whitehouse, wife of a rising Tory star who bonks his researcher. Is James our own Alastair Mackenzie? No, Rupert Friend, actually, but a more urgent question is this: why would anyone cheat on Sienna Miller? And should we not then seriously doubt their ability to make important decisions on behalf of the country?

You’re not alone in your confusion. The cabinet minister’s adviser remarks: “As Paul Newman once said: ‘Why go out for a hamburger when you’ve got steak at home?’” This weasley character, in Sophie’s presence, reckons he’s got the situation under control. Sex doesn’t have to nix a career any more, he affirms, telling Whitehouse: “A bit of fun with a filly … you might even gain some fans among older male voters.”

Sarah Lancashire as pioneer of cooking on TV Julia Child.

At first Sophie puts on a brave face. She looks back to how she first fell for David - during a Bullingdon Club-style rave-up at Oxford Uni while watching one of his mates indulge in “anal chugging” - and thinks, yes, I’m going to stand by him.

But it all gets too much. The Tory hierarchy’s determination to keep him in office (“He’s naturally gifted … and No 2 in SexyMP.co.uk … Just moved to No 1 - surely a first for the Conservative Party!”). The Prime Minister’s backing of him. A grandee’s reasoning: “Boys will be boys.” And then comes the bombshell of an accusation of rape.

Anatomy of a Scandal is adapted from Sarah Vaughan’s bestseller by David E. Kelley, the former lawyer who knows his way around a glossy did-they-really-do-it? blockbuster (Big Little Lies, The Undoing). The camera loves Miller, as well it should. It lingers almost as long on the fabulous interiors. We’re in a world of great privilege - and great entitlement. Michelle Dockery’s barrister, married to her job, seems to be building a case to knock it all down. In the first episode at least, all along the corridors of power, there’s only the merest flicker of self-doubt from the nation’s rulers. “What’s our party based on?” the PM is asked. “History, nothing more complicated,” he replies.

In the golden age of the music press I used to love Pete Frame’s Family Trees: spidery drawings showing the interconnectedness of bands. The format was transferred to TV but hasn’t been seen for a while. Here’s its welcome return.

My part in Britpop ... Suede's Brett Anderson

Rock Family Trees: the Birth of Cool Britannia (BBC2) avoids a retelling of the over-familiar and - with the Gallagher brothers involved - over-mythologised Blur vs Oasis saga and instead concentrates on the Britpop subplot which did involve Blur, but also Suede and Elastica.

At uni Brett Anderson, studying town and country planning, was a self-confessed “weird little provincial twig”. But Justine Frischmann (architecture), while not being sure if he was a boy or a girl with his earrings and handbag, thought he possessed a “strange kind of magic”. They fell in love and played together in Suede, who were “inept”, but then along came Blur’s Damon Albarn.

“He tracked me down,” says Frischmann. “And at that age I was so cavalier about love.” When she left, Anderson’s heartbrokenness inspired his songwriting. “Suede were so much better without me,” she admits. Blur, who’d been directionless, got so much better, too, and then the muse formed Elastica, who I always thought were the best of the bunch, although this may have had something to do with fancying Frischmann, just like everyone else. It was a creative, swappy scene, the spirit of Laurel Canyon transposed to John Major’s grotty, grey Blighty. But, says Frischmann, now a painter in California: “I’m so grateful we’re all still alive.”

Gerry Anderson: a Life Uncharted (Britbox) is a work of juddering juxtapositions right from the start. “A wonderful chap,” says an old colleague of the Thunderbirds genius. “A very evil man,” retorts another. Well, he shaped my childhood, and those of millions. But his own was so unutterably sad. Poverty-striken, with a mother who humiliated his father. Schoolkids who danced round him chanting “Jew boy”. Mum taunting him for turning as “ugly” as his dad and, when favoured older brother Lionel was killed in combat, being told: “It should have been you who died.”

No wonder, then, that he was unable to form relationships. Rows, fallouts, divorces, estrangement from his children. Youngest son Jamie has authored this warts-and-all documentary to learn more about the father he hardly knew. I don’t mind admitting that watching it I got something in my eye many times over. You see, after all these years I still wish I was a spaceman, in Fireball XL5.

Julia (Sky Atlantic) is the story of another telly trailblazer - Julia Child, queen of cooking on the box, at least in America, played winningly by Sarah Lancashire, with Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce as her snobbish husband. TV in 1961 is snobbish about women’s place being in the kitchen and kitchen during having no place on the small screen, but as soon as Child whips up an omelette on a stuffy arts show she’s away. Great fun.