Last week television showed us some eccentric people but they were nowhere near as strange as some of the people and things we saw this week. Jonestown (BBC2) was a Storyville documentary tracing the events which led up to the deaths of 909 people in 1978 at a settlement called Jonestown in Guyana. It was masterminded by an American pentecostal pastor named Jim Jones, who built his Peoples Temple into a potent community. Jones was one of those rabble-rousing preachers that the US seems to breed, and the sight of his congregation singing and raising their hands ecstatically resembled some of the trendy evangelical services you sometimes see on Songs of Praise.

The unquestioning faith of Jones's followers seemed unshaken by such sights as the punishments meted out publicly to those who didn't conform. Jones himself was not exactly a fount of virtue. One woman described how he forced her to have sex with him on one of the buses he regularly toured through the US trying to find new converts. When Jones's misdemeanours were about to be revealed, he decamped with his disciples to Jonestown, the refuge he was having built in Guyana.

When a senator visited the place with journalists and discovered that people were kept there against their will, Jones ordered his followers to take strychnine. Some people called this "The World's Biggest Mass Suicide" but one survivor called it what it was: murder.

Jonestown was supposedly a utopia, like Second Life - an internet website where you can create your own 'avatar' and experience an imaginary life. Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love (BBC2) looked at some people who have used the site and even become obsessed with it.

Worst of all was an American mother-of-four whose husband was understandably worried when she spent 14 hours a day having a 'virtual' affair with a Londoner on the website. The husband was even more worried when she decided to go to London to meet her friend. As the husband said: "A guy meets a girl . . . they're not going to crochet together."

In fact, the meeting convinced the London guy that the relationship meant nothing and the wife returned home to try and sort out her marital problems, although she just made faces when her husband told her how much he loved her. Another couple had a happier outcome from their experience on the website. When they actually met, they got married and are expecting a baby.

If you think people are daft to use such websites, how about lorry drivers who haul heavy loads along a 350-mile road made out of ice, often over frozen lakes? They are taking supplies to Canada's diamond mines on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Ice Road Truckers (Five) started a new ten-part series about these drivers, who can only work for 60 days a year before the ice melts. Sometimes the lorries slide off the road or even sink through the ice, and the drivers often work through the night - which lasts for 17 hours.

Monty Don has undertaken quite a journey for Around the World in 80 Gardens (BBC2). We have already had Michael Palin going Around the World in 80 Days and Dan Cruickshank travelling Around the World in 80 Treasures but Monty hyped up his own journey as "a global odyssey" and an "epic quest".

He started in Mexico, visiting the floating gardens (which don't float but are built up on layers of mud) and some gardens designed by Luis Barragan which had high coloured walls but very few plants. We saw plenty of shots of Monty and almost as many buildings as gardens, but we couldn't see the design and layout of the gardens he visited.

Yet Monty showed how gardens can reflect a country's culture and history - as in Cuba, where many small gardens have grown up among the buildings of Havana, to supply the fruit and vegetables that the country has to grow since Russia withdrew its financial aid.