Horizon: What Makes a Psychopath? BBC 2, Tuesday at 9pm
IF a psychopath is created by a mixture of troublesome genes and a horrible childhood, then should we feel sorry for the afflicted person rather than revile them for their crimes?
It was this difficult territory that Horizon and Professor Uta Frith were travelling towards in What Makes a Psychopath.
Prof Frith led us on a journey to discover what categorises and creates psychopaths, a condition which defines a majority of serial killers.
There are up to 400,000 psychopaths in the UK, she tells us, and it seems a 20-step questionnaire is the only current means of diagnosis and there seems to be a lot of guess work involved.
In essence, psychopaths lack social emotion and empathy with other people’s suffering, but psychologists are also looking for other indicators, including grandiosity, an inability to feel guilt or remorse, compulsive liars, superficiality and parasitic behaviour.
Researchers are starting to discover physical signifiers in the brain's make up but a conclusive test is a long way off.
It also seems that one is not born psychopathic, but you can be born with psychopathic tendencies and an abusive environment can trigger the full-blow effects, as it were.
Prof Frith brought us to a rehabilitation centre for teenagers in the US - all the examples were in the US, she explained, because of restrictive rules around interviewing prisoners in the UK - which has a high success rate in preventing teenagers becoming dangerous psychopathic adults.
The most gripping section of the documentary were interviews with a number of psychopathic men; all the examples were men and it was left unexplained if this is a condition which only affects one gender.
All were serving long sentenced for very serious crimes, including murder and rape. Others had sexually abused children and one had murdered children.
Prof Frith said that while she was repulsed by the crimes, she "sometimes" felt sorry for the perpetrators who may have been unable to escape from their physiological make up.
Clearly, it is virtually impossible, and socially unacceptable, to feel sorry for someone who has abused children or has raped or taken life for their own pleasure, but might we find ourselves in the future trying to diagnose paedophile tendencies in teenagers and seeking to treat them before they abuse?
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Great British Bake Off, Channel 4, Tuesday at 8pm
Bake Off fans have been waiting for this moment like football fans await the new Premier League season.
Although, while the transfer window for footballers closed only on Thursday, the Bake Off transfer news was announced in May.
So good was the new midfield general Noel Fielding that he would replace both Mel and Sue, while Sandi Toksvig would be the new Mary Berry.
I know even less about cooking than I do about football, so it was very difficult to discern if the new recruits were any good.
Everything looked the same and had the same feel about it because the same production company was in charge, but it'll be up to the Bake Off fans as to whether it was worth the hassle and expense for Channel 4.
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Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls, Channel 4, Tuesday at 9pm
Who would want to be a minor celebrity? Your future career may depend on a choice of humiliation on Celebrity Big Brother, sleeping with rats and eating insects on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here or a near-death experience with Bear Grylls.
The second series started this week with the celebrities running out of water, losing their camp to infestation and spending a night standing up shivering in the rain.
