By Jeremy Clay

At 29,000 feet, Everest isn’t just the highest peak on Earth, it’s also the world’s biggest moron magnet.

Every year they come. The incapable. The unprepared. The dangerously deluded. Or all three, in the shape of the Nepalese woman who turned up at the beginning of Everest ER (7.30pm, BBC1).

Her name was Usha. You may remember the reports of her rescue, back in 2007.

It involved an off-duty Canadian air force officer, a veteran American mountain guide and bountiful quantities of good fortune.

Frozen and bewildered, Usha had been left behind to die by her team-mates on the area of Everest cheerfully known as the death zone.

Now it would be all-too easy to sit here in the warmth and judge them ... so let’s do just that: what a gobsmackingly callous decision.

And here they were in the flesh on Everest ER, as the drama unfolded, and they were every bit as feckless as you’d imagine.

The show tracks the medics who volunteer at the world’s highest clinic. It soon turned out that doctors had previously told Usha she was unfit to climb, but she’d gone ahead anyway.

So it was hard to muster much in the way of sympathy when she was eventually brought to safety – in a selfless rescue operation which stood in stark contrast to the actions of her team-mates – and told she’d probably lose some fingers and toes to frostbite. Harder still, when they found her walking around, against medical orders.

Everest ER is a fairly formulaic show, but it’s lifted immeasurably by its majestic setting.

And it’s that setting which excuses its major flaw. The things that happen on Everest ER happen off camera.

The story is played out elsewhere, somewhere unreachable. Which is possibly all for the best. “I have had screaming diarrhoea and vomiting for the last 48 hours, and I’m down to my last pair of pants,” said one experienced Everest climber, with a weak smile.

Um ... remind me what the attraction is again?

The Secret Life of the Airport (9pm) was one of those amiable BBC4 documentaries which are marred by outbreaks of preening pretentiousness.

The subject was the jet age, and the screen was filled with footage of 50s schoolboys gazing in wide-eyed admiration at the planes at Heathrow.

Up popped Jonathan Glancey to explain the fascination. We’d been bombed, he opined, and the British needed to see aircraft were “messengers of peace, that they flew on wings of doves and not of eagles of war.”

Yeah. Or, perhaps, schoolboys just liked them because they were noisy and new.

Still, there was a nice story about a British woman going on her first foreign holiday.

“She screamed when we landed and wouldn’t get off,” said a former airline hostess. “She was so afraid. She’d never been anywhere before. We had to bring her home again.”