TV preview, Britain's Best Home Cook (BBC1, Thursday 8pm): Mary Berry is back with new baking show

Holy Mary of the Perfectly Textured Risotto returns to our screens. And if anyone so much as suggests the much-awaited ‘BBHC’ is just like ‘GBBO’, they’ll be sleeping with the fish pies...

Do the flandango: (from left) Claudia Winkleman, Mary Berry, Dan Doherty and Chris Bavin (BBC/KEO)

I genuinely believe that there are people out there who would cheerfully give up their own mum, granny or aunt and swap them with Mary Berry. Such is the adulation heaped on her that Berry seems to have moved with amazing ease into some new category of affection beyond “national treasure”.

If there was a poll to choose a new head of state for the United Kingdom, in due course, then I’m sure Berry would beat the Prince of Wales, Sir David Attenborough or Sir Mo Farah to the throne. Mary could nominate her cat, Badger, to become Prince Consort. Some yearn to see her beatified – Holy Mary of the Perfectly Textured Risotto. Maybe she could turn water into a suitable wine to go with supper. If she went for a bread and fish dish for 5,000 guests, she could be worshipped as the Mother of Cod.

Anyway, she’s back baking cakes, braising steak and stuffing olives, and whatever else you get up to in the kitchen in the much-awaited series of Britain’s Best Home Cook, ably co-presented by Claudia Winkelman, who looks a bit too glam for oven gloves, though you never know. Note that programme title, mind. “Home” cook. It implies that the amateurs are not to be the subject of some quasi-technical college series of tests, like in the Great British Bake Off that first brought her to prominence. No, this is, you are supposed to think, a more, well, homely competition, spread over a full two months, with Berry and fellow judges Chris Bavin and Dan Doherty. The fantasy is that you, the viewing public who know how to gut a herring or mould a dumpling, are invited to fancy that you, too, could be up there flannying around on BBC1, just a vol-au-vent away from instant celebrity status and a lucrative contract with a supermarket chain or some brand of spices. The reality is that it’s quite a lot like GBBO.

I’ll be watching with a takeaway chicken shashlik on my lap, by the way, because I know my place, and it is not in the kitchen.

Telling it like it is: Lyse Doucet in Homs, Syria (BBC)

If you want to actually understand what caused the Syrian conflict, who’s doing the fighting, which side we’re on, which side we ought to be on and who’s “winning”, then Syria: The World’s War, Lyse Doucet’s two-part BBC2 documentary on Thursday and Friday, ought to go some way to explaining it all. Ms Doucet has an unusual accent which I can’t make my mind up about (a bit distracting, on balance), but it is certainly distinctive, and, rather more important than that, her expertise and experience on the ground are among the best in the business. A fine reporter and analyst, in other words.

There used to be a lot more of this sort of explanatory, even didactic, TV on the air, and more of it found its way into the news bulletins too, so that you’d not only see children, say, gassed in their beds and washed up dead on Mediterranean beaches, but actually have some inkling into how they came to be there whereas a few years ago they’d be just happily sitting in a classroom in Aleppo somewhere.

How did the change happen, and why, we often ask ourselves – but with remarkably few answers turning up from the broadcasters. Hence, to an extent, the boom in fake news: a poorly informed public is surely more prone to it? So I for one hope that this effort is part of a future trend that that the BBC finds again something of its old “mission to explain” the news, long ago associated with a man called John Birt, once director-general and, it would seem, gone and forgotten.

Telling it like it’s not: Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk in ‘Cunk on Britain’ (House of Tomorrow)

The BBC is on more secure ground with its comedy output, as evidenced currently by BBC3’s British African comedy sketch series Famalam and BBC1’s Cunk on Britain. Philomena Cunk’s (Diane Morgan) faux naïve satirical history of the “United Britain of Great Kingdoms” comes bang up to date with Brexit and, in this case, you will know and understand less about Brexit at the end of the hour than you did before. (By the way my favourite mockumentary of recent years, This Country, is confirmed to return for a third series plus a special later in the year, and congratulations to Daisy Cooper for her two recent well-deserved Bafta awards.)

For the sake of balance, I ought also to mention the BBC’s historic role in promoting snooker, a more ambiguous achievement. More than anything else the BBC’s enthusiastic embrace of a game previously confined to dungeoney snooker halls means you can now find coverage of the 2018 World Snooker Championship, live and otherwise from the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, on: BBC One, BBC Two, Red Button, iPlayer, Connected TVs and online. It started last week and the last balls will be potted on 7 May. It all presents the perfect excuse to quote one of the great sports commentaries of all time, by “Whispering” Ted Lowe who once vouchsafed to his audience: “And for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.”

I’m quite taken by the premise of Channel 4’s True Horror series, which is simply that the horrors that do take place out here in the real world are, sad to relate, far more horrifying than anything that can be stewed up in the mind of even the most diseased horror writer. This week the eeriness is concentrated in a former plague pit in Horsham. Night terrors guaranteed.

In that context, there are few more baffling and intriguing events than the disappearance of passenger jet with the accompanying loss of its passengers, and to mark the four-year anniversary of the loss of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH307 somewhere over the Indian ocean Channel 5 are revisiting the inexplicable events, and attempting to explain them. Missing Flight MH307: Inside the Situation Room shows there is more clarity about what happened than one might expect, but, absent the flight recorder and other witness testimony, the mystery remains just that, and a compelling one too. Strange how quickly we seem to have forgotten such a huge story.

Elsewhere, the schedules are packed with the usual staples, of which the pick would probably comprise Britain’s Got Talent (which more often than not proves it hasn’t); First Dates, Channel 4’s charming and innovative eating-and-dating reality show; and the latest BBC flagship drama The Split, a complicated tale of backstabbing lawyers and backstabbing families. They do their best to make it unpredictable, but I have to say that a series populated by selfless, altruistic and saintly lawyers might make for a few more surprises. But then I’m a journalist, and I am aware that we rank even lower in the public’s esteem than lawyers, or even the guy who plays the piano in the brothel, so maybe that’s just me being envious.

Britain’s Best Home Cook (BBC1, Thursday 8pm); Syria: The World’s War (BBC2, Thursday and Friday 9pm); World Snooker Championship (BBC1, BBC2, Red Button, iPlayer); True Horror (Channel 4, Thursday 10pm); Missing Flight MH307: Inside the Situation Room; Britain’s Got Talent (ITV, Saturday 8pm); First Dates (Channel 4, Wednesday 10pm); The Split (BBC1, Tuesday 9pm)