Fat Beauty Contest (C4); Supernova (BBC2); At times it seemed it was a case of mission impossible for Charlotte Coyle in Fat Beauty Contest, part of C4's Shape Of The Nation series.

Organising a beauty pageant for big women gave her a big headache.

Charlotte is a size 18 model who works in America because she's too big to find work in this country. She wanted to prove that big is beautiful, to celebrate size and prove that women size 16, 18 and up aren't abnormal.

The title may have used the word "fat" but the programme preferred words like big, curvy and voluptuous as Charlotte set about organising a Miss Plus competition in the UK.

Such pageants are held regularly in the US, although the one we saw seemed to be a rather homemade affair staged in a small backroom of a hotel.

Charlotte suffered from having no money and no sponsors as she auditioned novice beauty queens. Jodie's reaction was typical of how the big women saw themselves.

"I thought I was too big for this sort of thing," she said.

"How do you feel about yourself?," asked Charlotte.

"Fat," replied Jodie.

The women's confidence and self-esteem had been knocked by constant comments about their size. Charlotte didn't help when she picked several smaller - size 14 - girls to go through to the next round and was criticised by one of her helpers. So she decided that only size 16 and up would be eligible to enter.

Funding and sponsorship were hard, impossible almost, to come by, although a sexy corset manufacturer eventually gave her corsets for the 12 finalists.

Beauty competition boot camp was a disaster as the women tried out the catwalk. They were stiff, awkward and self-consciousness and their insecurities came to the fore.

The documentary trod a delicate line between being sympathetic to the big women and exploiting their size for entertainment value. The result was a hotchpotch that was most effective when the women themselves were talking about the way people perceive them.

"It's an amazing feeling, you feel nice for the first time," said one contestant after going on stage. "Now it's over and I want to feel nice for the whole time."

The comedy series Supernova is back with Rob Brydon as the hapless, and hopeless, British astonomer Paul, coping with life in the Australian outback.

This week, 18-year-old Sam found him an object of desire. "I have a lot to give," she said before proving it again and again. They had had, he confessed, sex 17 and a half times - the fraction on account that "we fell off the fridge".

Supernova isn't a great comedy but the unusual setting and Brydon's appealingly useless hero ensure the laughs are there. And it's good to see a sit-com where middle-class families and sofas don't feature but camels, telescopes and magnetic oscillators do.

"She touched us all," said Paul as playmate Sam left.

"Some more than others," noted his colleague enviously.