Only television of the most rigorous kind – that, for example, which brings you a lecture or a performance – can avoid showmanship. Most TV is showmanship, and every attempt to bring us documentary or fiction must, by the nature of the medium, tell us as much about the show and its creators as about its subject. Thus the portraits of two driven men, given this past week, told us something of them, but also something of the way in which the driven men and women who create our myriad TV worlds – those ambitious and talented manipulators of ideas, narratives and us – think about their subjects.

Bill Gates: How a Geek Changed the World (BBC2, Friday) showed how the creator of Microsoft is now packaged for our consumption. He is a geek, a nerd – one who, from the age of seven, showed a fascination with new technologies and who in his twenties laid the foundations for what became the world’s biggest corporation. Besides an extraordinary ability to push the capacity of software, he also showed a natural business flair, a brusque way with competition and an unshakable belief in his own rectitude.