Toppling Saddam ... an insiders' narrative. The Iraq War.

If politics is showbiz for ugly people, this particular strand of BBC documentaries, which gathers together all the prime movers in a recent globally-significant historic event and lets them talk us through it in their own words, should adapt MGM's old slogan for its own ends – for here are more political stars than there are in the heavens.

Last night's opening episode of The Iraq War (BBC2), which dealt with the lead-up to its declaration, marshalled Tony Blair and his perennially earnest, gleaming-eyed face, Colin Powell, assorted other foreign leaders, former generals of Saddam Hussein's republican guard and various heads of the secret and intelligence services from both sides. You had to allow a moment for simple goggling before you could settle down to pay attention to what they were actually saying.

Together, their insiders' narrative revitalised the well-worn story of unswerving US plans for regime change, UN resolutions, WMDs, sexed-up dossiers (Andrew Gilligan did not appear, Alastair Campbell did, though not in relation to this aspect) Gallic vetoes and finally and (though you almost forgot during the retelling of it) inevitably, war.

How self-serving, disingenuous, self-deceiving, honourable or dishonourable each player's account was the programme makers left to the viewer to decide. But whatever the – probably irrecoverable – objective truth of all the matters, the programme's great service was to re-complicate the story and humanise it. Humanise it not in the sense of softening, excusing or making it more appealing, but in the sense of reminding us that our leaders are people and that even the most dramatic and far-reaching decisions are born out of a webby mass of opinion, estimates, best guesses, personal as well as political alliances, and trust misplaced and justified that gathers round a few granite chips of evidence and hard fact. You were left to feel horrified, sympathetic or some swirling mixture of the two as you chose.

Power, politics and the messy business of personal relations were also the subjects of Mothers, Murders and Mistresses (BBC4), presented by Professor Catharine Edwards or, as she is almost certainly destined to be known: oh, you know, that other one. The one who's not Mary Beard.

The opening episode traced the rise and rise of the second wife of Emperor Augustus, Livia Drusilla. With her help, he managed to found an imperial dynasty in a place formerly quite wedded to the notion of republicanism, see off various pretenders to the pseudo-throne and die a relatively peaceful death at the grand old age of 75 (provided that rumours that Livia fed him poisoned figs arose from the mutterings of resentful senators given too much credence by later historians and biographers, and not fact).

She wielded enormous, if unofficial, power for over half a century. She died at the age of 86, having spent her last years as a doughty dowager sporting an honorific title (bequeathed to her by Augustus, who presumably hadn't been worried about a figgy death), overshadowing and out-operating her son, the emperor Tiberius. She was deified 13 years later by her grandson Claudius and is doubtless somewhere in the firmament, still infuriating Tiberius as the Divine Augusta.

Edwards was quite a dramatic host, with a disconcerting drawl that largely dispensed with the letter "R" and had performed its own Great Vowel Shift so that you periodically ended up with sentences like "Mahcus Antony and Octavius effahctively divided the Roman wahld between them" which I must say took some getting used to. But after that it was quality classics all the way, a glorious hour of someone blasting away at the calcified ignorance in our brains with her accumulated knowledge.

Confessions of a Male Stripper: First Cut (Channel 4) was also, in its own way, an education. The strippers were The Dreamboys, the naked, waxed, tanned, oiled, ripped sine qua non of hen parties everywhere. Sine qua non being Latin for "owners of penises of a size that would surely only be an answer to a lady's prayer if she had carelessly left her g-spot in a different postcode". In answer to the first and most pressing, if unspoken, question – the dedicated Dreamboy uses a vacuum pump before the show and ties himself off at the base for the duration. It's the hardest-working ligature in showbiz. The answer to your second question is – no, the stripper lifestyle wasn't as much fun as some of the boys had imagined. But you couldn't help but feel that for a lot of them, for a lot of the time, it came pretty damn close.