Cutting Edge: The Animal Au Pair (C4, 9pm), God's Waiting Room (C4, 8pm), Peter and Dan Snow: 20th Century Battlefields (BBc2, 9pm)

JACKIE Rowberry is great at training animals for films. She's less happy when it comes to chosing an au pair. Candidates not only have to be good with children - her four-year-old son Josh - but also with animals. Not just the usual domestic pets, such as cats and dogs, but goats, ponies, sheep, reindeer and wallabies.

To that old actors' adage about never working with children and animals might well be added, never work with an employee as demanding as Jackie.

There can't be many au pairs who are reminded by their employee: "Don't let the wallaby out". Or, on hearing about elephants roaming near Michelle's African home, is asked: "How big is a pile of elephant poo?".

Never mind the constant reminders to clear up the animal poo in the yard. Jackie's au pair is not allowed to invite friends or boyfriends to the house, and must be home by 9pm. The reward is the standard going rate for an au pair of £100 for a 25-hour week.

Michelle, newly arrived from Zimbabwe, seems an ideal candidate. She doesn't even smoke. I'll rephrase that, she says she doesn't smoke. But she does, sneaking into a nearby field to have a crafty fag when Jackie isn't looking. As her mother died from lung cancer when she was 49, you think she might've changed her habits.

Her employee knows she's asking a lot. "You're not going to get someone who's good at everything because they wouldn't be going to work as an au pair for £100 a week," she says.

From the start, it's obvious something's going to go wrong. Leaving the terrapin out in a bucket is just one of Michelle's misdemeanours. Forgetting to give the ducks water and the doves any feed add to her list of mistakes.

The schizophrenic Cutting Edge documentary team is not only interested in Jackie's au pair problem. They also follow the progress of Michelle's quest to find the father she's never met.

The families in God's Waiting Room - formerly known as Knocking On Allah's Door - are bereaved and keen to bury their dead as quickly as possible, as Islamic law dictates. British red tape makes this difficult, not to say impossible, a lot of the time.

Taslim Funerals, based in East London, specialise in burying Islam's dead. They deal with 1,000 bodies a year from all over the country.

The film shows rather more than most people will want to see of the burial business, whether it's ritual washing or the grieving of bereaved families.

Taslim also arrange for immigrants to be returned home for burial. They take this very seriously, ensuring that the bodies travel in the right size coffin. If it's too big, the corpse can move around en route. "It's not a comfortable way for a deceased person to travel," says funeral director Moona, as if the corpse is in any position to complain.

The practicalities are brought home by the body of a murdered women that's been kept on ice for three months during the police investigation. When the undertakers collect the corpse, she's deep frozen, making immediate ritual washing impossible.

All comes right in the end. "As far as I'm concerned, the defrost went well," says Moona.

The Snows, father Peter and son Dan, are history lecturers in 20th Century Battlefields which begins with the Battle of Amiens in 1918, chosen as one of the battles that have shaped the world we live in today.

The Snows are a well-informed and enthusiastic pair who prove themselves capable of delivering a history lesson while walking through woods, in cemeteries, in streets, at the wheel of a car, on a bike and, finally, in a field of poppies.

It seems an awfully long battle, thankfully free of cheap reconstructions and depending instead of archive footage. The offbeat facts rather than the analysis of the action stick in the mind - like, for instance, that more men died from carbon monoxide poisoning in tanks than through enemy action.