They promised us a tale of royal skulduggery and then . . . pffft!

What a downright swizz. two academics lured us into watching their lecture on Persian politics in the Fifties by promising that the Queen was somehow involved in plotting to overthrow the government in tehran.

For almost an hour, Professors Rory Cormac and Richard aldrich led viewers on, letting us believe that her Majesty sent a secret message through diplomatic back channels, urging the young Shah of Iran to hold his nerve and let an uprising backed by anglo-american money propel him to power.

this was ‘the covert meddling of the Queen in the internal affairs of another country,’ crowed Prof Rory, emphasising: ‘She has to do it covertly.’ It wasn’t until the final few minutes of The Queen And the Coup (C4) that we discovered the mundane truth: a slightly garbled telegram from the Foreign Secretary’s office had caused a spot of fluster in the corridors of Whitehall and Washington.

the minister, anthony Eden, was on board the ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth, heading for Canada (this was 1953, after all).

the Foreign Office informed the americans they had ‘ received message from Eden from Queen

Elizabeth expressing concern at latest developments re Shah’.

Of course, ‘from’ meant ‘aboard’. Innocently or not, the CIa chose to interpret this mistyped telex as a royal edict to pull their fingers out and get busy undermining a democratic regime . . . thus securing a motherlode of oil for the West, while simultaneously annoying the Kremlin quite a lot.

that’s making a misplaced preposition do quite a bit of dirty work. If the professors had wanted to be more straightforward, they could have announced at the beginning that what might seem to be regal malpractice was in fact ordinary skulduggery by the secret services.

But openness is rarely the best policy for spies or dons who are eager to be tV historians. Full disclosure from the start would probably have relegated this documentary to a late slot on the Yesterday channel.

the profs would have done better to tell us more about their lurid cast of characters. I especially wanted to hear about ann Lambton, the niece of future prime minister harold Macmillan: she looked like a games mistress but in fact was a daring Middle Eastern operator and wartime propaganda wizard. Sadly, she was dismissed in two sentences.

the social charmer and opium addict Robert Zaehner, alias Doctor Z, also sounded fascinating. then there was Monty Woodhouse, tory MP and gentleman spy. With that trio, the professors had the makings of a really good espionage tale, and they blew it.

andrew Marr didn’t try to fool us with any double- crosses, in Great Paintings Of the World (C5). he simply wangled entry to the National Gallery after closing time, to admire Vincent van

Gogh’s Sunflowers and tell us the artist’s life story. It was, in Marr’s word, ‘harrowing’.

there’s little detail in this series, but plenty of broad brushstrokes on a big canvas. Marr, a keen amateur painter, pointed out a couple of the basics in Vincent’s technique, such as the thickness of the oil paint — but he sensibly didn’t grab a palette knife and show us how it’s done.

he didn’t dress up in a straw hat with a bandage over one ear either. there’s some presenters who would, you know.

Van Gogh was ‘the patron saint of loneliness’, we were told, which sounds like a line from a Johnny Cash song. this is art history with a populist twist.