WE’RE a nation of super sleuths. Overnight, the Joanna Yeates murder investigation has left everyone with a better understanding of modern forensics.

And now there’s a new series of Silent Witness (BBC One) to hone your detective skills and bring a bit of glamour to the morgue.

It wasn’t exactly a cheery start to the New Year. An eight-year-old girl was raped and killed, three patients copped it in one night on the same ward and a respected neurology professor stepped out in front of police marksmen. So the exquisite Doctor Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox) can be forgiven for feeling a bit glum and existential, even stopping for a lie down on the post-mortem slab.

Brimming with snappy dialogue, suspense and a healthy serving of gore, this was intelligent, well-written drama at its best.

Examining the complexities of mental illness, culpability and the responsibility a doctor feels when healing someone who becomes a killer, this was thought provoking stuff.

And even at the end, there was still sympathy for the perpetrator as, knife to throat, she pondered: “What’s the point of me?”

Thankfully we had the irrepressible Detective Inspector Skipper (Mark Lewis Jones) to bring a little light relief among all the moral wrangling. He even showed his softer side as he and the dashing Doctor Harry Cunningham (Tom Ward) raced to save their female colleagues from peril.

Personally, I can’t believe Nikki didn’t spot whodunit (four times, in the hospital!) sooner.

Forget the fact that Naomi Silverlake was everywhere you looked, came across a bit bipolar and undressed you when you were unconscious. She had curly hair! We’re always the crazy ones, you really should have known… And so from one sort of madness to another: this time, just real life in the 21st century and Britain’s Fattest Man (Wednesday, Channel 4).

As bed-ridden 46-year-old Paul Mason, reaching nearly 70 stone at his heaviest, lumbered up for a gastric bypass there was much discussion about how to get him to the hospital.

Paul’s surgeon, having decided a Jumbo-lance, an ambulance for the overweight, simply wouldn’t do the job, in all seriousness suggested a Chinook.

But as talk of moving “tummy aprons” and watching engineers reinforce the hospital floors turned stomachs across the land, flabby Paul happily tucked into some sandwiches he’d brought along for the ride.

There were heart-wrenching moments as Paul described how caring for his sick mother in his 20s had turned him to comfort eating and of the loneliness that accompanies his sickening obesity.

But then he would liken his care being cut from 12 to six hours to abandoning a child, or moan: “I wouldn’t have cost the taxpayer £100,000 a year if they’d let me have this operation when I was lighter,” as if he’d been force fed all that time.

We left a 21stone lighter Paul whizzing around Ipswich on a custom wheelchair, which he still needs to be comically winched into. He’s certainly eating less, and you want to believe he’ll walk again.

But if I’d just had a second life-risking op to remove more than a stone of flesh from my thigh, I might be trying a bit harder.

As usual Channel 4 tried to justify the voyeurism, asking questions about how the nation can fight the fat.

David Cameron should just stick a picture of Paul on every fridge in the land – and that should be problem solved...

Don't miss our interview with Silent Witness star Emilia Fox in this weekend's Echo Magaizine.