WITHOUT wishing to cause a consumer panic on a par with the Great Toilet Roll Rush of 2020, a serious shortage has come to my attention. It has been building for some time and has finally reached crisis point. Brace yourselves, people, for maverick TV detectives are running out of quirks.

Take the latest arrival in the ranks of crime-fighters, Professor T (STV, Sunday). Played by Ben Miller, Cambridge criminologist Jasper Tempest is rude, demanding, and has a galloping case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. While he’s a demanding sort, everyone puts up with him because of his Sherlockian brilliance in solving crime.

Professor T is not to be confused with the similarly quirky Richard Poole of Death in Paradise, also played by Miller, and any resemblance between quirky don Professor T and another quirky sleuth with OCD, Monk, is also purely coincidental. Shortages at the quirks factory, see?

Professor T tried awfully hard to be wacky and amusing. Frances de la Tour as the academic’s equally eccentric mother was a nice touch – loved the chihuahua in a bubble bath, darling.

Yet so much time was given over to establishing character, there was barely room for crimes to take place, and when they did the offences were neither wacky nor amusing. Since when did rape have a place in larky crime fiction? Likewise, OCD is not much of a chuckle. Perhaps someone can make this mishmash work, though they have a job on their hands.

Baptiste (BBC, Sunday) was an altogether more straightforward affair. It was gloom, gloom, gloom from start to finish as the family of British ambassador Emma Chambers (Fiona Shaw) went missing while on holiday in the mountains of Hungary. Turning up to help, unrequested, was Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo) because, as he explained to the distraught Chambers, that is what he does. Before you could say “haven’t we sat through this caper before?” Baptiste was getting on the local plods’ nerves by sticking his nose in and finding vital clues they had missed.

Cut to 14 months later, and both Baptiste and Chambers’ lives had changed utterly, and not for the better. What had happened, and why was Chambers now so insistent that finally they had a chance to solve the mystery?

Baptiste was always lugubrious, but here he was mournful to the point of being borderline tiresome. I sympathised with the hotel guest who interrupted one of the detective’s long speeches to say, “Sorry, can you get to the point?” The setting, snow and mountains and lashing rain, hardly lifted the mood either. The one bright spot, and the reason to keep watching, was Shaw, who played the plucky ambassador as if to a stiff upper lip born.

It is often assumed that no-one can hold a candle to the Americans when it comes to long form documentaries, a full, bells and whistles look at an era or subject. Uprising (BBC, Tuesday-Thursday), directed by Steve McQueen and James Rogan, disproved that theory in the first ten minutes of what was a three-hour, three-instalment film.

Beginning with the 1981 fire in New Cross, London, in which 13 young black people died, the filmmakers used a blend of photos, archive footage, and talking heads to put the tragedy, and what came after it, in the context of the times. The contributors, ranging from partygoers to police officers, were the strongest element. Fast-paced, full of striking images, and as intensely personal as it was starkly political, Uprising would have been at home on any big screen.

McQueen has an Oscar, don’t you know, for 12 Years a Slave. If there was an Academy Award for most shameless use of cute baby animals, the makers of Born to be Wild (BBC Scotland, Monday) would be checking out flight prices to LA.

Set over the course of a year at the Scottish SPCA National Wildlife Centre in Clackmannanshire, the hour-long opener to the second series was hoaching with orphaned animals, from fox cubs to oystercatcher chicks. One of the oystercatchers had been snatched by a gull but dropped mid-flight, so he already had a story to tell around the campfire.

April was in charge of fox cub rearing, and pretty nifty she was at it too. When the first of the season arrived she called him Solo (this year’s theme was Star Wars), fed him by hand, burped him like a baby and put a teddy in his box so he could have a snuggle. April was the kind of human we like.

Though too long at an hour, and with a script that suffered from repetition (how many times were we told April would be training her colleagues?) and a whiff of reality show cheesiness (“It’s a new day at the centre …”), Born to be Wild was a treat. Unless you were the gull whose supper had got away, in which case a stiff letter of complaint to Radio Times was probably in order.