FOLLOWERS of TV fashion will have noticed a trend in glitzy football documentaries. Gifted but volatile manager guiding his team through the highs and lows of the season, all the while battling injuries, agents and the press. High drama in tracky bottoms and more divas than a night at the opera: you know the kind of thing.

The makers of This is Our Story: Inside Hearts (BBC1 Scotland, Monday) have clearly been watching such shows and thought, “Scotland could do with some of that”.

As narrator Noof Ousellam told us, the story of Hearts was a tale of “how one club and its owner survived the most extraordinary season in Scottish football history”. So far, so exciting.

We saw inside the fancy dressing rooms, checked out corporate hospitality (“They all look right air hostesses,” said the club ambassador of the new staff uniforms), watched a run of grisly defeats, and played fly on the wall as the search for a new manager progressed.

On paper this should have been a winner, but it had all the oomph of a burst baw. Where to begin? We could state the obvious, that Craig Levein doesn’t have *quite* the same charisma as Jose Mourinho or Pep Guardiola. Or that club CEO Ann Budge is far too canny an operator to say anything rash on camera. You need mercurial sorts for such series, and Levein and Budge are about as giddy as a pair of traffic wardens. Next week: coronavirus arrives.

If it was trendiness you were after, Industry (BBC2, Tuesday) was just the job. Or it would have been a year ago. The tale of five graduate recruits at a City investment firm suffered more than most from being filmed pre-Covid. All those brokers sitting hugger mugger at terminals and sweaty drinks in crowded pubs, it looked like the 1980s rather than the near ghost town of today.

Lena Dunham of Girls fame was the director, so there were female-led sex scenes, and the C-bomb was dropped a couple of times. The characters, in contrast, were more run-of-the- mill: the wide boy, the hardworking kid from state school, the super smart American who is having trouble supplying HR with her university transcript, and so on.

The dialogue was laden with jargon and designed to impress, but the set-up was clear enough: the kids were competing with each other for permanent jobs, and it was every man and woman for themselves. With its multiple characters, several of whom share a house, Industry reminded me of This Life, but without that drama’s sense of humour and warmth. It could be a grower, though, with Harper’s story, she of the missing transcript, the most promising.

A new series of His Dark Materials (BBC1, Sunday), so time to play “If you had a daemon/spirit animal that summed up your soul, what would it be?” Mrs Coulter, the villainess of Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy, has a cheeky monkey with a vicious streak. I’d like a similarly bold statement, a jaguar maybe, but fear I’d end up with next door’s aged moggie (no offence).

When we caught up with Mrs Coulter (Ruth Wilson) she was being her usual ruthless self, whether berating the men of the Magisterium (“I look round this room and see failure”), or torturing a witch with tweezers. How do you torture a witch with tweezers? Well, let’s just say she didn’t give her a bad eyebrow job.

The first of seven episodes took a while to get going, with a fair bit of explaining and catching to be done. As luck would have it, Lyra (Dafne Keen) had crossed a bridge to a new world and found herself in Cittagazze, where she met young Will (Amir Wilson). He didn’t have a clue about dust or daemons, which was handy, so Lyra filled him in.

With so much time taken up with gabbing there was little left for the kind of spectacle that made the first series a hit. For all the gee whizz graphics and starry supporting cast (James McAvoy, Lin Manuel Miranda), the only show in town remains the tussle between Lyra and her destiny, and Lyra and Mrs Coulter, though I never met a series that did not benefit from an extra dash of McAvoy.

Looking back on years of property show watching, almost every time I saw Sarah Beeny she was pregnant and striding across a building site. The results of all those years of labour were on show in Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country (Channel 4, Wednesday). Besides four sons and a husband, Beeny, dubbed “Britain’s favourite property expert” (there must have been a competition) now has the kind of portfolio that has allowed the family to pursue their dream of living on a farm. I say their dream, but Beeny was quite open about the fact it was her husband who was the driving force here.

That honesty, their doubts, are what rescues the programme from being more than just a tale of Londoners playing at farming.

That, and the lambs.

More lambs less planning permission talk, please.