Dead Clever (ITV1); The Wind In The Willows (BBC1); The Secret Life Of Brian (C4): Writer Sally Wainwright's work often swings wildly between farce and tragedy.

Think of her lottery-win series At Home With The Braithwaites and even her recent housewife-becomes-PM series The Amazing Mrs Pritchard.

Neither of those had the extremes of Dead Clever as it veered between sex farce, murder mystery, love story and concluded with a Peckinpah bloodbath.

I'm not sure it worked entirely, not least because leading ladies Suranne Jones and Helen Baxendale were required to play their characters as schoolgirls in the opening scenes. Perhaps that was just part of the fun for them.

Ex-Corrie star Jones was the businesswoman who discovered her husband (Dean Lennox Kelly) was sleeping with her sister and fathered her child. Cold Feet's Baxendale was the best friend-turned-book-editor who discovered that she'd framed her husband and then assumed a new personality, leaving him to spend 15 years behind bars for her murder.

Wainwright, determined to leave no stone unturned, even managed to introduce a spot of lesbianism before we reached the prolonged, bloody shootout at the climax.

Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall's adaptation of children's classic The Wind In The Willows was violence-free - unless you count comic fights with stoats and weasels.

Never one of my favourite stories, Kenneth Grahame's tale of Toad and his friends looked a treat, moved along swiftly and got round the problem of humans playing animals by using minimum make-up and letting the actors suggest rather than bury them beneath masks and furry bits.

Matt Lucas might have been born to play outrageous, over-the-top Toad while Mark Gatiss was a delightfully raffish Rat, Bob Hoskins a grumpy Badger and Lee Ingleby a baffled Mole.

I can't imagine The Wind In The Willows fans complaining, but I remember clearly the furore that greeted Monty Python's film Life Of Brian when it opened in cinemas in 1979.

The story of a chap, Brian, mistaken for the Messiah managed to achieve the impossible - unite most religions in their opposition to what they saw as blasphemous.

The Pythons lined up to recall the controversy which saw EMI chief Bernard Delfont withdraw funding weeks before the cameras were due to roll. Then, as they put it, "a miracle" as Beatle George Harrison coffed up the £2m-£3m budget by pawning his house and office. That led to him setting up Handmade Films, which produced some of the key British movies in the following years.

The Pythons always maintained they weren't satirising Christianity but lampooning the blindly faithful. The public, who made the film a box-office hit on both sides of the Atlantic, clearly didn't agree with religious groups who complained about, among other things, the crucifixion scene in which people on crosses sing about always looking on the bright side of life.

Objectors included many who hadn't actually seen the film, which was given an AA certificate by our censors, allowing anyone over 14 to see it.

Some US states and local councils in this country banned it. So did Norway. People had to go to neighbouring Sweden to see Brian, which was advertised with the tagline, "This film is so funny they banned it in Norway".