How on earth did we ever manage before television experts arrived to sort out our problems? I suppose we didn't manage very well, as we had the Black Death, the Fire of London and the Boer War. Nowadays such minor difficulties could doubtless be settled by TV experts, for whom no problem is too small to solve.

So, if you are puzzled by cookery, you can watch Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection or Nigella's Christmas Kitchen (although one of Nigella's recipes in the Radio Times tells me to use a "mezzaluna" - what the hell's that?). If you have an unwanted antique to unload, you can consult David Dickinson (Dickinson's Real Deal) or the blokes from Antiques Roadshow, Flog It and dozens of similar programmes. If you want to save money on your shopping, Dominic Littlewood will sort it out in the new BBC1 daytime series Don't Get Done, Get Dom (however do they think of these titles?).

Or perhaps you are having trouble with your neighbours, in which case you can watch At War With Next Door (Five) to see how Col Bob Stewart deals with such matters. I have a natural aversion to anyone who calls themselves "Colonel" in civilian life, especially as Bob wears a beret as if he is either Alan Ladd or Frank Spencer. Yet he has experience as a mediator in Bosnia and Northern Ireland, so he should be able to sort out a pair of warring families in rural Kent. He manages to get them to make small compromises and eventually reaches a situation where the children are even playing together. This lesson in conflict resolution was useful, although we may not have heard the whole story, as when one neighbour accused the other of "something too libellous to broadcast".

Of course, we are entitled to wonder if the 'experts' are really expert. For example, Trinny and Susannah tell women "what not to wear" when they themselves seem to have no clothes sense. And Simon Schama pontificates about art even though he is primarily a history lecturer. Admittedly he has written a book about Rembrandt and has been art critic for the New Yorker but Simon Schama's Power of Art (BBC2) raises doubts about his suitability for presenting a series about art.

For this eight-part series, Simon has cherry-picked famous artists like Rembrandt, Turner and Van Gogh without actually throwing much light on their work. Most recently he focused on Picasso and, in particular, the painting Guernica - although we saw more of Schama than of Picasso. Visually the programme was a mess, using silly blurred reconstructions and pointlessly tricky montages which added nothing to the fairly basic exposition. Tim Marlow does this sort of thing much better.

Picasso's Guernica is a shocking, even horrific, picture. But many of the entries for the Turner Prize are shockingly horrific in another way - falsely pretending to be art. The Turner Prize Challenge (Channel 4) got four wannabe presenters to put together a film about one of this year's four Turner Prize contenders. They all tried to find something good to say about such things as Rebecca Warren's distorted sculptures and Phil Collins's "video installation" but the best they could come up with was that the works were challenging or shocking - to jerk us out of our complacency.

The trouble is that many things can challenge or shock us without having any artistic merit - and that is sadly the case with many Turner Prize nominees. Thankfully this year's winner was Tomma Abts - an artist who actually uses paint on canvas.

"Art is an excuse for everything" said one observer about Waste Man (Channel 4), the 80ft structure which Antony Gormley and a team of helpers erected in Margate's derelict Funland out of waste materials supplied by local people. The locals joined in the construction, including an Iranian refugee who compared the structure to the Statue of Liberty. It was an impressive sight, especially when it was set alight - although disturbingly reminiscent of the Wicker Man.