Monday night seems to be misery night, now.

Scandinoir got under our British skin, launching many a (David Brent alert) “watercooler conversation”, so it’s no big shock that we’re now feasting on a crop of homegrown crime dramas.

And their natural habitat is after work at the beginning of the week to make your own problems feel insignificant.

Job done, really, because when it comes to a bad day at the office, yours just doesn’t come close to that of Marcus Farrow (John Simm) in Prey (BBC2, now on iPlayer).

Viewers are warned to “prepare from bloody scenes from the start”, but it’s the sheer stress that surprises.

Whenever Simm is cast in anything, you know to expect an intense ride, and this takes the cake when the ‘hero’ copper finds his wife and son dead, himself framed and banged up in a meatwagon, then stabbed with a Biro, then on the run, having miraculously escaped unharmed from a road smash.

All within a few minutes. Not since Prometheus, when a woman is forced to perform her own rushed robot caesarean section (to deliver an alien baby), has my life seemed such a chillaxfest by comparison.

The shock-bang-wallop gets you hooked in this cash-poor, patience-poor world.

The pace is pulsing, hopping about the time frames like a super-slick Quantum Leap (but with Mancunian accents), forcing you to watch the scenes of big tension from two or three different angles so that they’re seared on to your brain.

But it’s the women in Prey who steal the show.

In the grand tradition of “goodie/baddie?” intrigue, DI Susan Reinhardt (Rosie Cavaliero) is presented to us a shambles. Stuffing burgers in her gob while stalking her ex, generally looking wrung out and p***ed off, jeered at and belittled by her workmates, here is a character we can identify with. Basically, Helen Mirren in Silent Witness she ain’t.

Her opposite number is the slick DCI “Mac” Mackenzie (Anastasia Hille) and with her Snow Queen hair and icy blue eyes, you start off rooting for her. By the third and final instalment, your emotions have been tugged in so many directions by bent coppers, debatable punches in the mouth and heart-rending resolution you feel exhausted and grateful.

Another bad day, in fact a bad week, is shared by Billy Connolly in his Big Send Off, (ITV Player). On the Tuesday he was told he needed a hearing aid; on the Wednesday he was given pills for heartburn... and on the Thursday he was told he had prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Ho ho ho.

Great timing, then, for the Big Yin to trek off to America to make a documentary about death and how people mourn, celebrate and mark The End.

Never afraid of being sentimental (Billy points out that it’s often snobbery in this country that pours scorn on big displays of emotion) and never mawkish, this programme was a joy. As Billy lies in a gold coffin assuring us that reports of his demise had been greatly exaggerated, you know you’re in good hands from the outset.

Via a Texan funeral directors’ convention (with spooky echoes of Six Feet Under), a palatial Jewish cemetery whose inhabitants frequently ‘upgrade’ to a classier plot (ie get dug up, perhaps to be replonked next to a waterfall if they’re doing well for themselves, relatively speaking), a pet cemetery with effusive messages to beloved Eva Braun the doberman and Gosia the guinea pig, death was pretty entertaining.

And that’s because Billy knows how to reap grim humour from any given situation to spin telly gold.