Oddly endearing skirmish even Phil The Flipper would struggle to sell

Bidding Wars ★★★☆☆ Royal Bastards: The Rise Of The Tudors ★★★★☆

The title of Bidding Wars (C4) turned out to be something of an exaggeration. Rather than a fierce battle, this was more like Friendly Bidding Skirmishes.

It’s similar to Storage hunters and other auction shows. eight contestants stand in a warehouse and bid for the contents of pallets, which contain goods returned by buyers. They know roughly what they’re bidding for, but are only allowed to peer at what’s on offer through a layer of shrink wrap.

The winner each week is the contestant who makes the most profit by reselling what they’ve bought.

If you’re thinking this isn’t the most glamorous idea in television history, you’d be absolutely right. Perhaps it was the cavernous warehouse set, or perhaps it was host Kevin duala’s catchphrase: ‘Let’s push in the pallet.’

Or was it the moment when contestant Phil was opening a box of 1970s kitsch, for which he’d just paid £180? ‘Interesting hairdryer, this,’ he observed.

Most experts agree that this is the first occasion on which the words ‘interesting’ and ‘hairdryer’ have appeared together on television at any time ever.

That said, Bidding Wars was oddly endearing. It’s a glimpse into the world of eBay trading, car boot stalls and thwarted ambition. Phil, who boasted that he was ‘Phil

The Flipper — I can sell flippin’

anything!’ hoped his kitsch might sell for £900. In the end, he managed a profit of just £83.

Some contestants clearly thought they were auditioning for The Apprentice. Shola boasted: ‘I’m the goal-setter and the go-getter’ And later announced: ‘Shola can smash it.’

She bought a pallet load of unwanted children’s bikes, mainly because she was feeling a bit left out. ‘I have no idea what do with bikes,’ she said as she unloaded her loot. She learned quickly, though, and cleared £420.

The winner was trader Ben, who made more than £600 from a collection of assorted fashion items. Yet the real sales hotshot here is whoever successfully pitched this very unlikely-sounding show to television executives.

Sorry, Shola, but they’re the ones who really smashed it.

Royal Bastards: The Rise Of The Tudors (Sky history) was basically Game Of Thrones produced by your history teacher. There was plenty of blood, the occasional beheading, and quite a lot of swearing, even from Queen Margaret of Anjou. Mind you, she was married to weedy henry VI so had a lot to swear about.

The budget for chain mail alone must have been eye-watering, but this action documentary did explain clearly and dramatically what happened during one of the most complicated episodes of english and Welsh history.

At the centre of the story was Margaret Beaufort, who became a widow at the age of 13 when her husband edward Tudor, on the

Lancastrian side of this Royal feud, died from the plague.

Margaret was pregnant at the time (just 13 years old, remember) and eventually gave birth to a son, henry Tudor.

Look away now if you don’t wish to know that this boy grew up to win the Battle of Bosworth and become henry VII.

That’s for a future episode. As we left it last night, the Yorkists had the upper hand after winning the Battle of Towton, a gore-fest which claimed 28,000 lives in a single day.

To put that into perspective, that’s like killing everybody in a town roughly the size of Stratford-upon-Avon.

When it came to battles, our medieval ancestors didn’t mess about.