Pie-eyed driver Dr Foster makes Wayne Rooney look like a saint

One breathalyser test, and all the melodrama of psychological thriller Doctor

Foster (BBC1) could be sorted out. The cast spend half of every episode glugging wine and the rest leaping into expensive cars.

Warring couple Gemma and Simon (Suranne Jones and Bertie Carvel) make Wayne Rooney look like a responsible driver. Take away their car keys, and all the spiralling retaliations will end.

For the first half of the series, I assumed that Gemma’s style behind the wheel was some sort of Freudian metaphor mirroring her rampant sexual frustration.

She was forever circling her ex’s house, then slewing onto his driveway and dinging his car wing mirror with her door.

But the erotic tension was swept away during a long session of what Auntie Beeb prudishly calls ‘scenes of a sexual nature’. Gemma tried to entrap Simon into seducing her while she secretly filmed.

When he tumbled to her ruse, she demanded to be ravished anyway.

It was all a welcome riposte to the usual TV rule, that women only have sex when they are forced into it. But disappointingly, Doctor Foster then gave in to the common convention that all men are rapists, when Gemma’s 15-year-old son, Tom, admitted that he had sexually assaulted a female friend at a party.

He tried to defend himself by pleading he’d been drunk. That’s never an excuse, especially in Doctor Fosterland, where everyone is pie-eyed.

But Tom’s booze binge is relevant to the story, because Gemma had made her son swear not to drink that night. It was Simon who pressed glasses of wine on the boy, just for spite.

The couple’s break-up is so toxic, it will poison everyone around them. even their son is nothing more than collateral damage.

Gemma’s night of wild abandon did little to improve her driving. The next day she was skidding around the genteel market town of Parminster like she was auditioning for a Seventies cop show.

even Starsky & Hutch could park a car better than her — she just abandoned it, doors wide, on double yellows. It’s a good job the local traffic warden was also a patient of hers.

By the end of the episode, Gemma and Tom were back on the road, fleeing the chaos for a new life. It was the perfect parallel to the first series, which ended when Simon was hounded out of town.

But there are still two episodes to go. This meltdown isn’t over yet.

The antidote to all this lurid excitement was to be found, of all places, on Channel Five, spiritual home of the Unknown Celebrity. Alaska: A Year In The Wild (C5) was a luminously beautiful wildlife documentary set in the Arctic snows.

The show, narrated by the melodious voice of David Suchet, started with an avalanche of statistics about temperatures and latitudes, but thankfully soon gave up on those.

What followed was simply a series of lovely images, like the fluffball of an Arctic fox that skipped over a glacier, so that its paws wouldn’t freeze to the ice.

The American dipper, a sort of blackbird that thinks it’s a duck, dived for larvae. A bald eagle circled over a humpback whale, waiting for it to drive shoals of herring to the surface so that it could swoop down and grab a fish supper.

Musk oxen the size of elephants pawed at the ice, trying to scrape up morsels of lichen. Drone cameras circled high over polar bears, until it seemed that we were looking down on them from outer space.

It was all hypnotically pretty.