LESLEY Sharp does something amazing in new crime drama Before We Die (Channel 4, Wednesday). She acts her age.

Her character, DI Hannah Laing, has a demanding job, a love life she has to keep secret, an ex-husband with a new family, and a son she turned in for dealing drugs. She’s complicated.

From Innocent, The Pact, and Unforgotten to Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown, women who are middle aged and older are having “a moment” on television. They are not invisible any more. They are out, proud, and happy to rock a no make-up look. Heaven knows where it will all end, but I’m liking it.

Hannah, as we see from the opening scene where she has her son nicked (she thought he would get a suspended sentence; he didn’t), is a tough sort. When her partner, a fellow copper, doesn’t come back one day from a rendezvous, she knows enough to be alarmed.

Rather like Laing herself, Before We Die is far from straightforward, with several roads leading to Croatia, and back to the war in the former Yugoslavia. Nor is it above some ropey dialogue. Does anyone actually say “It’s your funeral” any more, as a supposedly veteran officer (played by the otherwise blameless Vincent Regan) does here?

You can see the entire six part series on All4, but I’m going to take this one week by week, old school-style, in the hope it lives up to the promise of Sharp’s performance and those moody black and white opening shots.

The Pursuit of Love (BBC1, Sunday), which came to a close this week, more than lived up to initially high expectations. We finally came fully circle to the scene in the first episode where Linda and Fanny (Lily James and Emily Beecham) are two best friends, both heavily pregnant, reunited in the rubble of the Blitz. In the last instalment, wild spirit Linda met a rich duke (Assaad Bouab from Call My Agent!) and looked set for her longed for happy ending. Alas, it was not to be, sniff, sniff.

This has been a treat of a series. Okay, the whole “here’s a modern song in a period setting” schtick has been done to death, there was too much faffing around at the start, and some viewers found Linda unbearably flighty.

Everything turned out beautifully in the end, particularly the performances of James and Andrew Scott as the naughty, drawling Lord Merlin, a devotee of the bohemian life. When a person is tired of Andrew Scott, etc. His speech about Linda’s “magical, haunting sadness” was one of many cherries on top.

They would not go anywhere near something as naff as a cherry in Bake Off: The Professionals (Channel 4, Tuesday), which returned for a fourth series. If the regular Bake Off is the Territorial Army, this is the SAS with pastry knobs on.

The patisserie challenges set by judges Benoit Blin (so French he makes Fred “First Dates” Sirieix sound like Fred Flinstone), and Cherish Finden (cape-wearing queen of mean) are ridiculously difficult and fiddly. At the end of each episode, the pastry chefs face the challenge of moving their showstopping creations from one table to another, praying the swaying edifices hold together. As presenter Tom Allen put it, in a phrase you could only find in this show, “The threat of centrepiece collapse is everywhere." Since such calamities are now firmly part of the programme – baked in, as it were – bring on the disasters.

The judging is tough, properly tough, none of your Paul Hollywood twinkly scowls here. And for professionals the contestants can be as endearingly scatty and stressed out of their cake boxes as their amateur counterparts. One managed to leave a plastic mould in one of their sponge creations. You don't get that in Greggs.

What are We Feeding our Kids? (BBC1, Thursday) was the question posed by Chris van Tulleken. None of your flaming Whopper business I might have replied. But as the doctor said, obesity among children is a here and now crisis. Some 21% of children are obese by the time they leave primary school. The problem in general costs the NHS billions to treat.

Tulleken made a convincing case for blaming ultra-processed foods (UPF), your frozen pizza, chips, chicken nuggets, ready meals end of the market. To show its effect on the body he ate a diet that was 80% UPF. Unsurprisingly, after a spell of eating rubbish he felt rubbish, and had gained weight.

But the man representing the food and drink industry disagreed that UPF was to blame for obesity.

Indeed, he disagreed with the very term itself, arguing that foods are not intrinsically harmful, bad diets are (the everything in moderation line).

That said, if the Government told the industry to change it would, he conceded. Given it is much more expensive to eat healthily, as the programme had shown, we were now getting into trickier, more political territory,

and the good doc left it at that. Unsatisfying.