TV preview, Wonders of the Moon (BBC1, Wednesday 9pm): How does our nearest neighbour in space shape our lives?

The Moon may shape our lives in so many different ways, discovers Sean O’Grady, but ‘the banality of evil’ back here on Earth is entirely down to humanity – or the lack of it

The effects the Moon has on life and weather down here are so much more dramatic than the pretty dull reality up there (BBC)

Wonders of the Moon, as you might expect from the title, is a delightful anthology of Moonish things, and, in fact, most of the wonders of the Moon take place here on wondrous Earth. Waves, coral spawning, folk rituals, pagan larks, harvest festivals as you’ve (probably) never seen them celebrated out in China, Easter, Ramadan, Pink Floyd’s albums, David Niven’s memoirs, green cheese – humanity has been in thrall to this lifeless rock for all time. It is ironic indeed that the effects it has on life and weather down here are so much more dramatic than the pretty dull reality up there. An astronaut, naturally, is on hand to tell us what it’s like to navigate the Ocean of Storms. Satellite TV at its best.

Death Row 2018 with Trevor McDonald doesn’t, I’d admit, have the most promising of titles, but no one should underestimate the journalistic instincts of the old boy, as sharp as ever and showing no signs of dimming as he heads for his 80th birthday next year. A true hack, then, and the stories he uncovers on a variety of American death rows testify to the banality of evil, as when a serial killer cheerfully admits that “I could kill a person and then go out for dinner. I don’t even care.” If you’ve ever thought you might have encountered a psychopathic personality somewhere then that is probably the test to judge them by. The murderer concerned, with three women’s deaths on his conscience, if he had one, will in due course himself be offered a traditional last meal and then find his own life snuffed out.

McDonald wisely doesn’t go dwell on the morality of the death penalty as much as expose its reality and the reality of those who live under its shadow. He leaves the viewer to consider if these killers are, as the judicial system has it, “beyond rehabilitation”, and the consequences of that. (I will admit, though, that if you happen to have spent the previous hour with Sir Trevor on Sky’s Duck Quacks Don’t Echo, a light entrainment science quiz show hosted by Lee Mack, the senior anchor man’s gravitas may be eroded just a little.)

The New Builds are Coming: Battle in the Countryside is as good an explanation for the British housing crisis as you’re likely to find this side of a romp round the Rightmove website. (Property porn is still freely available and legal in the UK.) Everyone agrees there are too few homes; no one agrees on who should pay for solving the crisis; and no one wants whatever the solution happens to be turning up in their backyard. In this two-parter, Richard Macer talks to all involved in a plan to build some 3,500 new homes in rural Oxfordshire. In what you might term Theresa May country – this is the county she grew up in and where she went to university – the clash of values and interests is almost painful to observe. Ours is a nation suffering from advanced real estate schizophrenia.

Can You Rebuild My Brain? is about Lotje Sodderland, who documented her recovery after she suffered a stroke aged 34, in her the award-winning film My Beautiful Broken Brain (Netflix). For this new documentary on Channel 4, she travels to the frontiers of brain science. I appreciate these are all very different medical conditions, but Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and autism can also be some of the most distressing. Sodderland meets those who are at the very forefront of neuroscience using the latest knowledge to repair “broken” brains. There are scenes of surgery, so you have been warned.

History fans will be well served by Holocaust: the Revenge Plot. The story has been told before – and the documentary does rely on some older archive interviews, given the distance in time from the actual events – but the concept of “an eye for an eye” and its application to post-war Germany is still a tale that compels the attention. That the deaths of six million Germans through a mass poisoning of the water supply was something seriously contemplated and planned by “the Avengers” is true, though, and one can only wonder what might have happened had they come even remotely close to their objectives.

You should also make time for Andrew Graham-Dickson’s romp through the royal art collection in Art, Passion and Power, where this week he assess the taste and acquisitive tastes of George IV and Queen Victoria, personalities so different it is hard to believe they came from the same gene pool (though both had art, passion and power in common).

Last, I need only point to the compelling evidence that, contrary to many reports, British television is as lively and brilliant as it ever was: Inside No 9, the fine series of dark comedy plays by and starring Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton (late of The League of Gentlemen, now on its fourth run and, if anything, more inventive than ever. This week sees Zoe Wanamaker, Kenneth Cranham and Phoebe Sparrow recruited to define the essence of celebrity.

Wonders of the Moon (BBC1, Wednesday 9pm), Death Row 2018 with Trevor McDonald (ITV, Thursday 9pm); Duck Quacks Don’t Echo (Sky 1, Thursday 8pm); The New Builds Are Coming: Battle in the Countryside (BBC2, Wednesday 9pm); Can You Rebuild My Brain? (Channel 4, Tuesday 10pm); Holocaust: the Revenge Plot (Channel 4, Saturday 9pm); Art, Passion and Power: the Story of the Royal Collection (BBC4, Tuesday 9pm); Inside No 9 (BBC2, Tuesday 10pm)