Miriam at close quarters

IF TELEVISION asked us to vote for Britain’s Favourite National Treasure (and, come to think of it, how come it hasn’t, given that we’ve had pretty much every other kind of countdown by now, most notably Channel 5’s Britain’s Favourite Biscuit?), then surely a leading contender would be Miriam Margolyes.

Miriam may not poll as many votes, I suppose, as Joanna Lumley, Her Majesty or Alan Titchmarsh, but she’d surely have to be a top five contender.

I mention her because she’s back with us tonight for another of those distinctly personal documentaries that she’s taken to making of late.

In this one, MIRIAM’S BIG FAT ADVENTURE (BBC2, 9pm), she’s setting out to discover why, despite so much information these days about healthy diet and exercise, so many of us are overweight.

She also addresses how unhappy she’s been with her own body for as long as she can remember.And, needless to say, she approaches both topics in her own fantastically frank, no-nonsense manner.

Miriam, who’s 78 years old, 4ft 11ins tall and weighs 14st 10lbs, begins by stepping onto a machine that measures her body mass index.The results are not great.

“It’s 41.6,” reveals the doctor. “So, I’m morbidly obese?” Miriam replies. “Is that what it’s called?”

“If...that’s the terminology you want to use,” she’s told.

“No, well, what do you call it? Bloody fat?!”

Miriam doesn’t have an all-round downer on herself, she’s keen to stress. “I’m happy with who I am,” she insists. “I’m happy with my face, I’m happy with my life.”

But she adds: “I am disgusted by my body. I loathe it. If I could migrate my whole personality and my face onto another body, I’d be delighted.”

And whose would she choose? “Claudia Winkleman.” Elsewhere, it’s week three of this year’s MASTERCHEF (sorry, unfortunate juxtaposition, can’t be helped), and this opening heat

(BBC1, 8pm) features some particularly ambitious contestants.

Emily, from Derbyshire, enjoys experimenting with molecular gastronomy and is preparing a smoked mackerel pate. But making the accompaniment is proving a nightmare. “Those beetroot tuiles,” warns judge John Torode, “are proving to be her nemesis…”

And finally, I’m disappointed to report there were no previews available of tonight’s FOOD UNWRAPPED (C4, 8.30pm).

But, hey, who’s to say I need one? Among the items will be a report on eggs, promising to reveal the difference between the ones that come in boxes marked “medium” and the ones that come in boxes marked “large”.

What the heck, I’m just going to take a wild guess…