I reckoned it was going to be a lean TV week, beyond the deliciously tempting curry odyssey that is Rick Stein's India (BBC2, Monday), of course, which retains its place at the top of my favourites list. But there were a couple of surprises on the horizon.
I was drawn – mostly by a flurry of postings on Facebook – to a documentary which turned out to be a ratings hit. The Man with the Ten-Stone Testicles (Channel 4, Monday), a Bodyshock special grabbed in excess of three million viewers – a lot more than Rick, according to statistics. It's also caused rather a lot of controversy in the media, ironically because the man of the title – 49-year-old Las Vegas resident Wesley Warren Junior – appeared to enjoy the attention his rare medical condition attracted.
Well, excuse me for saying so, but doesn't this poor guy deserve just a small bit of pleasure out of his life, even it does come the voyeuristic instincts of TV viewers?
This is a poor and lonely man, with a sad, unloving past, who, by his own confession, was always a misfit. But he got by... until he rolled over in bed one night in 2008 and accidentally knocked his testicles.
For no reason the doctors could establish, initial swelling developed into scrotal elephantiasis or scrotal lymphoedema – a rare medical condition that is so severe that he couldn't walk normally, use the toilet normally, wear trousers, go to work, drive a car, have sex, or even sit down without the help of a milk crate.
This was an intimate and embarrassing ailment, but as his testicle sac grew daily at an alarming rate, there was no hiding place for Warren. And no expert medical care, either, because he didn't have enough insurance to pay for it.
That's an inconceivable thought in the UK where we do, at least for the foreseeable future, have a National Health Service. His suffering would surely never have reached the desperate, life-threatening stage it did.
Pretty much trapped inside his cramped apartment, with only a pair of loyal friends to help him with difficult everyday tasks, Warren decided to go public, asking for help to pay for an operation to be done out-of-state by the only surgeon willing to even try. It was humiliating for him and ultimately unsuccessful, amid a backlash about his "celebrity" status. I was relieved to see the wall finally crumble and the surgeon and his team perform the dangerous operation pro bono. And whether that was prompted by the presence of a mildly sympathetic film crew is neither here nor there. Warren has some semblance of a life back; he's always going to be an oddball, but why should that give him fewer rights of enjoyment than the rest of us "normal" folk.
Talking of oddballs, I rather like the company of the game-for-pretty-much-anything actress and presenter Daisy Donovan. She presents The Greatest Shows on Earth (Channel 4, Monday), which came on straight after and helped dispel the disturbing images. It tapped into my India obsession too, focusing on the weird and wacky TV shows that obsess the country's 1.2 billion people. Public participation is big news and especially when it concerns precocious children. Daisy got some coaching on how to wow the judges on Dance India Dance from seven-year-old overnight sensation Jeet Das.
She also met Sikh group The Warriors of Goja, who use traditional martial arts skills to thrill – for instance, holding a batch of fluorescent tubes while a colleague smashes them with a sledgehammer, eating glass and running each other over in a car.
It got weirder still when she got up close and personal with Bollywood legend Aamir Khan – India's answer to George Clooney – who hosts a no-holds-barred talk show tackling issues from female foeticide and domestic violence to honour killings and child abuse. Ten-stone testicles started to look tame.