Rewind TV: The 7.39; The Taste; Born to Be Wild – review

The 7.39 (BBC1) | iPlayer

The Taste (Channel 4) | 4oD

Born to Be Wild (BBC4) | iPlayer

David Nicholls's The 7.39, a two-part drama about extramarital doings following a brief encounter on a commuter train, was stuck on rails in more ways than one. It said Waterloo on the front, and that's where it went. Surely a romance needs a few surprises? It started with some obligatory rudeness (regarding seat etiquette), proceeded with banter of a suspiciously polished kind, dithered coyly, engaged in some generic hotel lovemaking and concluded with wailing and gnashing of teeth all round. That was the express version anyway.

I don't know if it's because David Morrissey's smile seems less authentic than his scowl, but was I alone in finding his innocent passenger chat (as Carl, a happily bored married man and property rental executive) a bit on the creepy side? Wouldn't the woman (Sally, a gym manager breezily played by Sheridan Smith) have run a mile? Did anyone else laugh out loud when the train obligingly braked in the dark, sending our soon-to-be lovers lurching into each other's dental hygiene zones? It wasn't hard to muster sympathy for poor Sally, uncomfortably affianced to a muscle-bound personal trainer who (in a rather too tidy reversal of gender stereotyping) divided his attention between running "total body-pump" classes and yearning for babies and a sugar-frosted wedding with castle, carriages and bagpipes. It seemed (as Daisy laughably said to an admirer in Downton the other week) they "wanted different things". But Carl struggled for our vote, not least because the excellent Olivia Colman (a phrase I use so often these days I'm beginning to creep myself out) was playing the wronged wife. Colman earned her money in the angry denouement, though this wasn't a role made in heaven, her main task being to help shovel on the dramatic irony – joshing adoringly with her grumpy husband and telling the kids the goofy tale of how they met as students. Who could believe they'd been married and brushing their teeth together for 15 wisecracking years!

You couldn't move for signals. There was some ominous foreshadowing in which Carl's boss – a man whose lack of empathy was written in his verbless sentences – showed him what happened to staff who were easily distracted. And Carl's turbulent new emotions (guilt mingled with an eager appreciation for the unbridled spirit) found handy, tailor-made applications in the subplot – yes, his daughter could now have that new violin she had been previously denied; and, yes, why not allow his son to pursue that dangerous passion for drama he had disapproved of only last Saturday afternoon!

OK, it wasn't terrible. In fact you could say it was agreeable, but only in the way that watching scenery go by is agreeable. I would have thought Nicholls (a bestselling novelist with his impressive One Day) could have done this standing on his head. But then maybe he did.

Those who haven't been able to get enough of Nigella Lawson recently will have been delighted to have her back on Tuesday with The Taste, a show aimed at finding Britain's best unsung cook or chef from an anonymous spoonful of their chosen dish. Yes, a bit like BBC1's The Voice (the third series of which kicked off promisingly on Saturday in a riot of enthusiasm from new judges Kylie Minogue and Ricky Wilson) but with tripe and onions instead of singers.

Nigella and fellow judges – badass New York writer Anthony "Tony" Bourdain and Ludo Lefebvre, a French chef with an accent made of strong cheese – set to thinning out a field of 25 hopefuls to 12, each celeb vying to build an A-team of four to mentor through the next round.

With so much to get through, no one wasted time showing us how things were cooked. First up was duck with sprouts and chocolate. It was a particularly large mouthful. "Too much dog," announced Ludo. The woman responsible for it came beaming out to meet us. The men were politely uninterested but Nigella (in good form, by the way: at this early stage we had already heard "sinful" and "seductive") gave her an immediate "yes".

It didn't strike me as the ideal way to choose teams. What if the first 12 were snapped up and then the next 13 turned out to be a hundred times better?

But no one was talking methods in statistics and probability when they had an 18-year-old Dale suddenly brimming with tears on being told that his pig cheek was fatally over-chutneyed. A distressed Nigella rushed to his side; Ludo looked alarmed; Tony, more pragmatic, thought the boy ought to "toughen the fuck up". A minute later, Ludo and Tony were jostling for the favour of a striking young woman called Dixie despite respectively finding her lamb with pomegranate seeds like "bebby food" and "texturally problematic". Deaf to Ludo's pleas that he could make her "bedder and bedder", she tied herself to the apron strings of silver-tongued Tony and waited to be taken to his kitchen. As did a delighted young Malaysian food blogger, who wowed all with his astonishing chilli prawn! Did we detect a pattern, with the hapless Ludo increasingly unfancied by the best candidates and smug Tony taking the piss? Ludo fumed. "You fet well in the room but you don't fet well in the kitchen," he warned. How long before the two of them are fetting each other with steak knives?

Born to Be Wild was one of those BBC4 documentaries about classic American rock that you could watch while doing the ironing, given that many of the clips used were ones you sometimes see in other BBC4 documentaries about classic American rock. This first of three was a thoughtful programme, though, reminding us how music twisted the way of historical currents in the 60s: Kennedy and King, peace to revolution, flower power to the Detroit riots – the journey from hedonism to darkness as observed in the contrasting priapic attitudes of Hendrix and Jim Morrison. I loved the story of how the Doors' drummer John Densmore dodged the draft by ticking the box "homosexual tendencies". Far out.