TV preview, Gordon Ramsay on Cocaine (ITV, Thursday 9pm): the celebrity chef turns crusader

Plus: Chris Packham: Asperger's and Me (BBC2, Tuesday 9pm), Lucy Worsley's Nights at the Opera (BBC2, Saturday 9pm), Lucy Worsley: Elizabeth I's Battle for God's Music (BBC4, Tuesday 9pm), Liar (Monday, ITV 9pm), Our Girl (BBC1, Tuesday 9pm), QI (BBC2, Friday 10pm)

Ramsay gets to the root of what he considers a scourge of society in this new series (ITV)

Maybe I’m odd but I’d never thought of Gordon Ramsay as anything more than a chef who swears a lot. I’ve never met the chap or eaten his food (which I am sure is delish), although I think I once stopped for him and a child to cross the road in London.

So I don’t share the visceral hatred that seems to infect many people who behave as though he was their mate or someone they’ve grown up with and known all their lives and detest him personally. Having said that, he doesn’t seem to me to have a particularly pleasant way about him, although, there again, I do recall he nodded acknowledgement when I gave way to him.

I am, though, fully on board with Ramsay and his latest project named, with maybe a little too self-conscious irony, Gordon Ramsay on Cocaine. In this I am prepared to embrace him as a brother against this great scourge of modern society, one regarded too lightly by too many. Ramsay isn’t, of course, a friend of Charlie, and he hates drugs because of what they are, because of what they have done to friends and colleagues close to him and his family – his brother Ronnie, a heroin addict, has a history of homelessness and has gone missing for the past six months.

Maybe this show is an attempt to portray Ramsay in a more sympathetic light to the viewing public that sustains his celebrity status and thus his living? I don’t know, but no matter. If Ramsay’s graphic and deeply personal revelations have the effect of saving even one family from the trauma of addiction then it will have done some good. And he can swear as much as he likes while he’s at it as far as I’m concerned.

A mild TV trend in recent times has been the celebrity illness documentary. That sounds dismissive, but it’s not meant to be. Understanding the fairly commonplace conditions that affect so many is no bad thing, after all, and if it takes a familiar face to do so rather than some anonymous voiceover or medic in white coat then so be it. I can recall Andrew Marr’s moving, even upsetting, chronicle of the causes, partial recovery and quest for treatments for the serious stroke he suffered a few years ago, and Rory Bremner also took the opportunity to “come out” with his attention deficit disorder, or ADHD.

Now it’s Chris Packham’s turn to invite us to join him in the celeb clinic as he, with some discomfort, explains that he is “on the spectrum” as the phrase goes. Chris Packham: Asperger’s and Me makes for provocative viewing, especially when Packham travels to America to look at “transcranial magnetic stimulation”, that is claimed to be a treatment for the syndrome – which prompts the obvious question as to whether something so intrinsic to identity and personality can be a legitimate target for a “cure”.

I do admire the way Lucy Worsley manages to pack it all in. She is, after all, chief curator at the Historic Royal Palaces (which sounds like a full-time job) and is prof at a couple of colleges too, as well as writing all those books and articles and, of course, popping up rather a lot on television. This week, as far as I can see at any rate, she’s confined to just the two shows – Lucy Worsley’s Nights at the Opera and Lucy Worsley: Elizabeth I’s Battle for God’s Music.

Lucy Worsley is back on our screens with her ‘Nights at the Opera’ (BBC)

You’ll have spotted a couple of themes there – the musical focus, but also the precedence of her name. Normally I’d regard this as absurdly vainglorious, but so engaging is her story-telling that it is forgivable. She can play the virginal (a kind of Tudor-era piano) too. Maybe one day someone will make a documentary about the amazing talents and life of HM Queen Lucy Worsley. In the meantime you’ll have to make do with the queen of the telly herself.

I ought not say too much about the denouement of Liar, which has been one of the more successful of the current epidemic of home-grown pschodramas, complete, as it is, with holes in the plot, vicarious torture for the viewer and, to be fair, some fine acting, especially from Joanne Froggatt, who is becoming ubiquitous (though nothing to rival Lucy Worsley yet). The only thing I think I can just about get away with is to give you the clue that that the resolution of this mirrored tale is, as you’d expect, unexpected, and no doubt controversial.

What I hope will be a welcome addition to the menu for Freeview users is Forces TV, which parachutes down on Channel 96 on Tuesday. It promises the best of military-themed show across factual, drama, comedy (please God, not Jim “Nick Nick” Davidson) and news. I should certainly prefer it to Our Girl, which is supposed to be about the British army but which is just so incomprehensibly bad it can’t be said to be about anything. Whereas QI (back for a new series) is so good it can be fairly described as being about everything: a pub quiz for would-be intellectuals, on the spectrum or not.Sandi Toksvig (another ubiquitous soul), Alan Davies and Claudia Winkleman star.