Never let it be said the BBC doesn’t make the most of its talent. Once Auntie thinks you are hot property she will spread you around like butter on toast.

Take the presenter of Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure (BBC2, Monday-Wednesday, Friday). I was just about to start watching when a text came through announcing the corporation’s election night line-up. With no Huw Edwards around it will be Myrie and Laura Kuenssberg in charge on July 4. A new BBC king and queen are crowned.

Myrie is having “a moment” at the moment and it is not hard to see why. For a start, he’s good, with a solid grounding as a foreign correspondent. But he also has that certain something, that secret TV sauce, that means he can be reading the news one night and asking questions on Mastermind the next, and be convincing and likeable in both.

Caribbean Adventure wasn’t just another celeb on holiday show. Well it was, but Myrie piled on just enough history and contemporary references to make the four-part series a cut above the rest.

Myrie’s parents were part of the Windrush generation. As a child he enjoyed many a holiday in Jamaica but never saw beyond the main spots. First stop on the tour was a coffee farm in the Blue Mountains. Except coffee doesn’t agree with him, so he invited his sister along to do the tasting. Later, we would hear all about his wife’s upholstery skills.

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Next he tried his luck at stilt-walking, met an MP who wants Jamaica to be a republic, picked up some dance hall moves, and went market shopping. People warmed to him everywhere he went. It was just that kind of programme fronted by just that kind of guy. In the words (almost) of a certain Dick Emery character, you may be everywhere Clive, but we like you, and good luck on election night.

Where Myrie has the gift of making anything he is in watchable, Eric (Netflix) had “haud me back”, HMB, stamped all over it. Any drama that centres around a missing child better have a very good reason for putting viewers through the wringer. This one starred Benedict Cumberbatch, it was written by hit-maker Abi Morgan (Suffragette, The Split), and just look at all the Netflix money that had gone into recreating early 1980s New York as a grubby, close to lawless sprawl.

Cumberbatch played Vincent, a puppeteer with his own TV show. It was Vincent’s 9-year-old son who vanished one day on his way to school.

To cope with the trauma, Vincent’s mind imagines that a character his son created, a big blue furry monster called Eric, has come to life and is helping him look for the boy. Odd enough for you yet? Morgan is just getting started.

Over six hours she does a Dickensian sweep of the city, picking up plotlines and political issues as she goes. Homelessness, Aids, addiction, corruption at city hall, racist police, gentrification - it is all here and then some.

But back to the big blue furry guy who only Vincent can see. Sooner or later, as with every imaginary character, Vincent has to engage with his vision in ways that, to put it mildly, look daft. So we see Vincent shouting into thin air at the invisible Eric, Vincent having a punch-up with an invisible Eric, and so on.

It might have been funny had it not been so painfully earnest. The saccharine levels, rising with each episode, were eventually off the chart. I won’t deny there were a few poignant moments, and watching Cumberbatch is never a waste of time, but everything about Eric was too much, from the sudden lurches in plot to the desperate rush to resolve everything at the end.

I couldn’t work out the bank holiday scheduling of Theresa May: the Accidental PM (ITV1, Monday). The hook was her autobiography, Abuse of Power, but that was published last September. Maybe there was some scintillating revelation everyone missed the first time? Turns out no. There was one new thing - a claim that Downing Street had cleared the Chequers deal with Angela Merkel before the Cabinet saw it, but that was swiftly denied.

What we got was an 80-minute canter through her life and times that sought to find out why she ultimately failed in the top job. Was she “undone by her own weaknesses or brought down by the betrayal of others”?

The answer was both (it’s always both) but we went through the motions nevertheless. From running through wheatfields (“The naughtiest thing I've done is answer that question”) to what she thought about Boris Johnson (“I don’t normally comment on my successor”) she proved to be as poor a communicator out of office as she had been in.

The only laugh came when they showed “that” conference speech again, complete with letters falling off the set. Comedy gold. Something to thank her for anyway.

While watching I Googled her book. It’s now selling at a 48% discount. Hurry while stocks last.