It is no accident the biggest wally Steve Coogan ever created was a broadcaster. For towering vanity and endless neediness, Alan Partridge takes some beating.

The Douglas in Douglas is Cancelled (ITV1, Thursday) is willing to try, but given lovely Hugh “Downton/W1A/Paddington” Bonneville plays the character there is a limit on how much of a monster he can be.

Douglas is not a bad person, you see, he’s just a chap of a certain age who is bewildered by all this talk of wokeness, or what they used to call in his day, political correctness. He can’t make head or tale of it, but he knows it is a bad thing to enrage the social media gods. Now a sexist joke he might have told at a wedding has gone viral with the help of his Live at Six co-presenter Madeline (Karen Gillan). Before you can say “Richard Madeley”, Douglas is on his way to being cancelled.

Created and written by Stevan Moffat (Doctor Who, Sherlock), Douglas is Cancelled is more of a comedy-drama about journalism than it is a sitcom about wokeness. The wokeness stuff is the weaker part of the package, coming across as slightly dated. Outside of the usual suspects, does anyone still rail about “micro-aggressions” and pronouns?

The show is at its best when the A-team cast is given free rein to be odious meeja types, as seen in Drop the Dead Donkey and W1A. Alex Kingston as a newspaper editor, Simon Russell Beale as Douglas’s slippery agent, Bonneville and Gillan (terrific) as the archetypal spring/autumn presenting duo? What a line-up, though I did wonder if the snarkiness might get too much after a while. Still, only four episodes so it won’t hang around for long.

A more flattering portrait of the trade was to be found in Storyville: Bad Press (BBC4, Tuesday). This feature-length documentary homed in a good old-fashioned fight for press freedom taking place in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, capital of the Creek nation.

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In Okmulgee, the locals love their newspapers and radio shows, but the local tribal council is not a fan of so-called “negative news”, ie stories that show its members in a bad light. So what does it do? It passes a law bringing the media under its control, which it is allowed to do under an exemption granted to Native American tribes.

The handful of reporters left, led by the magnificently aggrieved Angel, decide to fight back. But will the readers and listeners back them? Another in a long line of excellent Storyvilles that takes what could be seen as a story of limited interest and uses it to expose a wider truth.

A family that has everything suddenly loses it all and ups sticks for pastures new. After the initial shock of hitting rock bottom they rediscover what made them successful in the first place, becoming better people in the process. There are echoes of Schitt’s Creek about Land of Women (Apple TV+). Hints, too, of Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell and early Almodovar, with a nod towards Mamma Mia (though mercifully without the singing). It’s a jumble, but an enjoyably undemanding one.

Eva Longoria plays Gala, who has recently opened a high-end wine shop (fancy off-licence) in Manhattan, only to find her husband owes serious money to some nasty people. Gala flees with her daughter and mother to the village in Spain from which her madre left for America many years ago. On arrival, the past proves to be as full of questions as the present. Why, for starters, is it mostly women working at the local vineyard?

Eva Longoria has been shockingly underused since Desperate HousewivesEva Longoria has been shockingly underused since Desperate Housewives (Image: free)

Disgracefully under-employed since Desperate Housewives, Longoria is good value as the pointy-elbowed, sharp-witted New Yorker, with Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Volver) as her aged mother with a wild past. After two episodes you can see exactly where the tale is heading but the predictability is part of the charm. Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials (Channel 4, Sunday) found the Vigil and Doctor Foster star giving the patriarchy what for, which is never a bad thing.

In the first of two films she picked apart where the seventeenth century mania for blaming women for everything that went wrong originated. Crop failure? Witchcraft. Illness? Witchcraft. Her travels took her to see the singer Bat for Lashes, aka Natasha Khan, and the pair had a good old howl together. That’s howl as in wolves. I couldn’t quite see the connection between wolves and female empowerment, but Jones found it invigorating. “It feels so good, doesn’t it?” she asked Khan. “Better than a headache tablet.” I bet the crew disagreed.

Much of the history was familiar from the witch hunts episode of Lucy Worsley Investigates, though I don’t recall LW howling. The conclusions were the same too, though how could they not be? The only thing these “witches” were guilty of was being women: old women, poor women, powerless women, but women. In most cases they were simply being punished for having an opinion and daring to voice it. Seems women wouldn’t wheesht even then.