Meades Eats (BBC2); Loving You (ITV1); Weapons Of World War II (five)

Presenter Jonathan Meades reminded us that someone once said that a history of a nation's table is a reflection of a nation's civilisation. This doesn't say much for the British who rarely eat at the table, prefering to balance a plate of food on their lap in front of the telly.

I hope nobody was eating while watching the Meades Eats programme about fast food. This, he reckoned, is like pop music - ubiquitous, unbidden, all pervasive. If we're not eating it, we're looking at it or smelling it.

Meades won't have made himself popular with the fast food industry. Or even viewers, who may have found his I-know-best, looking-down-the-nose style of presentation too superior and opinionated for their tastes. But he did make some valid points about what we stuff into our mouths.

We do have our standards, as well as words for meat, pork and beef, that don't identify the animals from which they come. The meat is presented in geometrical forms, such as hamburgers, that obliterate any connection with the source of the food.

This is because we love animals so much. So much that we eat them. We do draw the line at horses. Others, notably the Belgians, Germans and French, make use of the whole animal, including horse fat. "Everything but the whinny," suggested Meades.

Sales of one brand of sausage slumped after an advertisement linked the product directly with the animal. Meades decided to make his own "great British banger". He began by buying a condom to hold the MRM - Mechanically Recovered Meat, or "abattoir slurry" as he so charmingly put it. This is cooked at a very high temperature to kill bacteria in the excrement it invariably contains. Then add various flavour enhancers as, he contended, "the fast food industry is a department of the chemical industry".

There was much food for thought here, as there was in a very different way in the drama Loving You, which used child abuse to put divorced mother-of-two Chloe (Niamh Cusack) in a dilemma when new boyfriend Dan, an educational psychologist, was charged with indecently assaulting a six-year-old girl.

Her ex-husband (an unusually restrained Keith Allen) wasn't happy. "I don't give a damn who you're sleeping with, I do care who my children are living with," he told her. Her trust in Dan was severely tested as police and parents planted seeds of doubt in her mind, and she was branded as someone protecting a child molester.

The thriller element meant that the did he or didn't he do it? aspect of the story had to be resolved, and indeed it was in a somewhat melodramatic and not entirely satisfactory way.

Weapons of World War II considered gliders in a fascinating look at an aspect of warfare of which many would have been unaware. This silent military aircraft played key roles in many operations, including the D-Day landings and Operation Market Garden.

Gliders had the advantage over parachute drops of landing all the men in the same place, making them ready to fight immediately. They also "delivered" tanks and jeeps to battle areas. But they needed surprise on their side, and were too vulnerable for large scale operations.

On D-Day, troops aboard gliders landing in the French countryside were liberated the first French civilians, the owners of a nearby cafe. One woman was so jubilant that she kissed them all - and ended up with a face covered in black camouflage paint, which she didn't wash off for three days.