While not yet official, key industry sources are confident that NBC will, in the next few days, announce the show's pickup for its back nine episodes (giving it a full season complement of 22) in the wake of two consecutive Mondays of upwardly-trending numbers.

Well it was nice seeing Nathan Fillion again on Lost. I generally don't watch Lost (kinda lost my way last year when they kept doing repeats(G)). But cruising past it I spotted him and paused. So Kate was married to him. Interesting. Be fun if he turns up on the island. I might even start watching again.

Good news indeed for us Studio 60 fans. (First the election, then Rummy's departure, now this! A good week!)

...Overall, I couldn't help being reminded of an episode of The West Wing titled "20 Hours in America" (had to look it up) in which Josh, Donna and Toby get left behind by the presidential motorcade in rural Indiana and have to make their own way back to Washington, D.C.

The first of this autumn’s harvest of big nature series, Planet Earth (Sunday, BBC1), took a glossy, elegiac, meltingly haunting look at penguins and polar bears. The BBC has become so practised at these vast, soft-centred uber-nature films that there’s a sort of vain swagger to them. The beautiful images come on with the flourish of Italian opera, confident and patronising in their ability to astonish. After 10 minutes of all this wonder and skill and sublime bloody panoramic beauty, I simply couldn’t take any more. I’d come to the end of the godlike, hyper-real, grand-production nature series. I’ve had the box set, the tea-tray books, the repeats. That’s it. The genre has collapsed under its own self-regard and become a parody of itself.

Let me just tell you a few of the things that choked me last Sunday. First it was poor old David Attenborough, who’s become the Laurence Olivier of voice-overs, the stand-in voice of God. You could hear the resignation, the swallowed disgust at the copious streams of fruity, clichéd, sentimental bilge he had to intone like Christmas-card greetings over the film. The factual content is now virtually nil, just scene-setting and needless telling you what you’re seeing. There was barely any attempt to differentiate between North and South Poles. Who cared? And the observation becomes ever more disengaged from a human-sized reality. The camera angles get higher and wider, giving an omnipotent view, and the sentimentally grandiose music is beyond bearing, like the overblown accompaniment to a silent movie or Tchaikovsky orchestrating cartoons. The wildlife itself is sentimentalised, anthropomorphised and edited into a cute narrative in a way I thought we’d all grown out of with Disney in the 1950s.

But mostly what I mind is the hidden hand of American culture and scientific social censorship. Like most big BBC nature series, this was a co-production with the Discovery channel, which has a long and weird set of requirements for its products: very little violence, no blood, hardly any sex and very, very hazy, noncommittal science, especially where it may contentiously upset fundamental Christians. Essentially what it wants is pretty, unnatural nature for 10-year-old, conservative Midwestern creationists. Now, I understand that this sort of programme is eye-wateringly expensive, and getting other broadcasters to share the expense makes bottom-line sense. But the BBC is not a commercial company: your licence fee is being used to subsidise American commercial television, and it’s being made to their specifications.

The BBC is the world’s biggest broadcaster. Only it has the experience and the ability to make programmes of this stature. And it can sell them around the world after they’re made. It shouldn’t sell them before. This is our television, not a bespoke nature tailor for America. The interference, both overt and unstated, in the BBC’s programming should be a central question in the renewal of the licence fee. It is one of the most damaging interventions in our culture. British television is in danger of going the way of British film: becoming a source of highly skilled technicians hired out to make someone else’s culture.

It’s a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing. And DBC Pierre told it, in The Last Aztec (Thursday, C4), with a livid, partisan elan. The Booker-winner naturally took the hideously weird Aztecs’ part, which is fine: partisan history is more interesting than the even-handed stuff. His personalised, off-the-cuff delivery was a refreshing pleasure to hear and watch after the posed grandiosity of most television historians...

Too Big to Walk? (Mon-Wed, C4) did exactly what it said on the family-sized tin. It showed us hideously corpulent people who couldn’t walk from Devon to Edinburgh. I’ve always wondered how some people manage to get so much fatter than the rest of us, and this programme finally answered the question. Really, really gutbucket, obscenely Jabba-gargantuan folk are that big because they need the space to store their self-pity in. Rarely, outside of a walrus colony, could you hear such a chorus of self-justification, attention-seeking and infantile whingeing. I never thought I’d be able to say that fat people are gutless. Not only that, they were at times unpleasant to each other. Fat people always beg the rest of us to look beyond the carapace of adipose blubber and see the sweet, sensitive person inside. Well, after Too Big to Walk? it was obvious it was the skinny person inside who was inflating the grotesque outside. This was not an edifying, entertaining or attractive programme.

I tried to watch Sat. Nite Live last nite (Alec Baldwin). I was hoping for a bit of humor, but sadly the show just seems very tired. I didn't have the energy for it.