The new season on BBC Prime on DStv continues into October with a wealth of documentaries, drama and entertainment programmes.

Lifestyle programmes take a tour around Europe this month. Grand Designs has grown to be a BBC Prime favourite and now it’s time for designer and writer, Kevin McCloud, to venture further afield. In Grand Designs Abroad, the series follows self-builders creating their dream home from scratch but this time there are unfamiliar planning laws and language barriers to contend with.

There are more such adventures in No Going Back: A Year in France. In the latest series of this charming observational show, a London couple give up successful careers to run a small upmarket hotel in France. Follow their fortunes as they struggle to turn a 250 year-old chateau into first class accommodation and to grow and cook food for their guests. Meanwhile, in the third series of A Place in France, Nigel Farrell decides on a similar new venture: to rent a farmhouse and offer bespoke bed and breakfast holidays to British tourists.

Prime People shifts its focus to female writers this month. So for the inside story on George Eliot, Jane Austen, The Brontë sisters and Elizabeth Gaskell, look no further than Saturday evenings on BBC Prime.

The Inspector Lynley Mysteries continue with more contemporary murder mysteries featuring the crime-cracking duo, DI Lynley and DS Havers. And Martin Shaw (Death in Holy Orders) is back in a new series of Judge John Deed as the High Court Judge with the maverick approach.

Strictly Come Dancing highsteps into a second glitzy series while new comedy comes to Prime in the form of the eclectic group of characters in the Smoking Room. Dry humour and pathos are the order of the day in this series exploring the personal foibles and suppressed longings of the employees of a large company who have nothing in common except their dependence on the ‘weed’.