His ardent Highness

TV Review: What does one do with a tap-dancing Prince Charming with a pancake stick? A personage as tiresome and defunct as a bubbling appendix, as futile as a paper parasol on a cocktail stick blowing around an empty marquee. Prince Edward: The Showbiz Years is the first in a series looking at Prince Charles's brothers (pssst, he has only two!) so, starting with the bronze, we got Edward.

He is "an unnecessary member of the royal family", we were told, which seems a tad unfair, just because his siblings are better at mucking out the polo ponies and stacking their mum's Tupperware. Edward's showbiz years amounted to a couple of heady trysts in his legwarmers in the Cambridge Footlights, producing It's A Royal Knockout (during which he had a jolly good time with the dressing-up box and got John Travolta to hold his jousting stick), and making the tea and answering the phone for Andrew Lloyd-Webber at the Palace Theatre ("Hello, this is Edward at the Palace" - you don't say). As titles go, Prince Edward: The Showbiz Years was perhaps pushing it a little.

Lloyd-Webber and Edward met at a garden party and got on like a tacky lyric in a catchy tune. They had a couple of things in common: they both had too much money and enormous teeth, teeth that would be the envy of a monumental sculpture, teeth you could bury the entire royal family under, teeth that could carry inscriptions on them. The friendship didn't last too long and Edward, having tried and failed as a West End theatre producer, decided to move into television. He called his production company Ardent. You don't call a production company Ardent; it's like calling your Rottweiler Debbie.

You could call your production company "two dogs having ardent olfactory knowledge of each others' bottoms", but don't call it Ardent. Please.

Ardent, which promised not to make documentaries about the royal family, made documentaries about the royal family. It survived until balding Uncle Edward infringed on young wavy blond Prince William's privacy by lobbing a couple of cameras over the wall of his university and buying fellow students a curry in the hope of a vindaloo-induced revelation to spice up his latest programme. Edward's showbiz years came to an abrupt and decisive end when he and his frosty wife, Sophie Rhys-Jones, with her troublesome PR business and a smile that could shatter glass, were reined in by Mother. They were both sentenced to life in the hand-shaking gang.

Next week, the series examines Charles's other brother, Andrew, and scrutinises his contribution to society. Well, he did marry that redhead who wrote Budgie, The Little Helicopter . . .

Sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock'n'roll was the stuff of Secret Sights, an enthusiastic, well-paced journey with photographer Rob Vance as he explored Ireland's medieval heritage. Vance travelled to Skellig Michael, the sixth-century hub of God's universe that drew monks seeking spiritual isolation to build their beehive huts on the summit of this inhospitable rock 12 miles off the coast of Co Kerry. But what really drove them out of their communities carrying the earth for their own graves? Vance speculated that these men (such as Columbanus who, we were told, whipped himself into submission to avoid the temptations of the flesh and induce spiritual ecstasy) were the boybands of their day, desirable medieval celebrities.

They were attractive and charismatic and they could chant - and they didn't have a hissy fit if the dressing room was too small. These men, Vance suggested, were trying to get away from their adoring fans, the sixth-century groupies who presumably couldn't swim.

Vance also investigated a profitable 12th-century Augustinian community in Kells, Co Kilkenny, where the hospitality included in-house herbalism and, from the monks' own brewery, a staggering 12-pint-a-day beer allowance. Then on to a monastery in Askeaton, Co Limerick, where a cash dispensation to the pope could buy the right to marry and where one monk fathered 14 children. It all seemed very jolly and reasonable and New Age.

Next week brings us up to the Vikings, who forgot their Neil Young albums when they invaded and made everyone feel a little less chilled.

Wonathan Joss went to LA to make his promising new series, A Secret Map of Hollywood, of which the first programme was a treasure-hunt of vice along the four-mile stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. "From glossy myth to grim reality", the once-glitzy catwalk of the beautiful and famed now resembles Mosney on a windy Sunday. As Ross said: "Tourists come in search of glamour, and glamour makes itself scarce." The stars who once populated the restaurants and movie theatres along the strip have, like the studios, departed - the current crop are holed up in their mansions in the hills, surrounded by agents, minders and PAs.

Ross picked through the dust of various scandals from the boulevard's heyday, as revealed in the exposés of Confidential magazine in the 1950s, which now seem as innocuous as a bowl of rice pudding. It felt a little as if Ross was holidaying with a brittle corpse. What life is left on the strip seems to reside with the unauthorised biographers and the celebrity-watch journalists with their "groin-level" reportage.

However, one store that is doing a roaring trade is Trashy Lingerie, a members-only boutique which sells exactly what it says on the tin. The client list includes Cher, Madonna and . . . Robbie Coltrane (in a thong?).

Apparently, and you really don't need to know this, Drew Barrymore has bought more than 1,000 pairs of knickers in Trashy Lingerie - unfortunately, her house burned down and she lost everything, which gives a whole new meaning to hot pants. Ross was, as usual, a self-assured, urbane and pleasant guide through this minefield of compellingly useless information.

Channel 4 has been digging through the archive again, sticking a ladette voice-over on top and calling it a season. X-Rated: The TV They Tried To Ban began the, well, "Banned" season. It was not easy to stay awake through the shocks.

X-Rated took a bellicose stand towards the "theys" of the title, the complainers and media watchdogs who patrol the small screen. TV, we were told, used to be a posh little grey mouse in the corner - and some people would have it stay that way. Channel 4, part of the remit of which is to cater for minority viewing, admitted that it is getting hard to be controversial. Surgery shows and live autopsies have stretched the boundaries of good taste. Sex has been well and truly uncovered, from "mile high" soft porn (complete with acrylic fingernails) in Footballers' Wives to explicit gay sex in Queer as Folk.

Penises, as a matter of interest (regardless of their predilections), are allowed on TV as long as they resemble the Mull of Kintyre - that's the flaccid bit hanging off the side of Scotland. Bad language has been elevated to operatic heights with Gordon Ramsay's 84-f***s aria on a cookery show, which barely raised an eyebrow. Religion has increasingly become the focus for outrage and complaint, and once again Jerry Springer: The Opera took the plaudits for most-complained-about TV.

It all seemed as wearily familiar as last year's winter vests, and then you realised it actually was wearily familiar, you had seen it all before. This, after all, is the TV "they" tried - but failed - to ban. There is a jaded audience out there, we were told, soporific from reruns and quasi-documentaries, and yes, they too have seen it all before, from lobotomies and boob jobs to cross-eyed farmhands fellating miniature ponies - and doubtless they'll see it again, and again, perhaps tarted up as some anthropological feast for Channel 4 minority Christmas viewing. The murky question of what's next on the horizon was explored, and the public looks set to get what the public wants - live executions were the dire prediction. Where's that mouse in the corner gone?