I’d rather watch T-shirts on a rinse cycle than this claptrap

THIS is a trick question, so be careful. Which budget makes for better TV — ¤30 million of goldplated grandeur, or an armful of local newspapers costing about ten quid?

The answer is neither. Both were on offer, and both were rubbish. In fact, if you had a washing machine handy, you’d have been better entertained by putting a load of T-shirts on a rinse cycle and watching that instead.

Secrets Of Growing Up (ITV) was what cynical producers call a ‘cuttings job’. They trawled through a stack of evening papers from around the country, found a few out-of-theordinary stories about children and teenagers, and strung them together with some phoney science.

There was no presenter, and only the flimsiest of themes, as we met a succession of youngsters who had made the headlines. One lad in Southend had survived with just grazes after he was hit by a car at 35mph and flung into the air.

This was presented as medical proof of the six-year-old human body’s power to withstand trauma, though you might as well call it proof that guardian angels really do exist.

A teenager called Maud, who almost flunked her A-levels because she couldn’t get up in the mornings, switched schools to one that let her have daily lie-ins. Her results improved so dramatically that she has now earned a degree from Manchester University.

Well done her, but I suspect her success is due more to her loving and supportive family than to any dubious ‘sleep science’.

The family of 13-year-old Jamie Edwards, from near Preston, did all they could to dissuade him when he announced he wanted to build a nuclear fusion reactor for his school physics project.

How he succeeded where decades of Iranian scientists have failed was not explained, but, if I were a supervillain bent on world domination, my first move would be to kidnap Jamie and put him to work in a secret lab, probably inside a volcano.

Then there was the young photographer who recklessly climbs cranes to take pictures of London, and the seven-year-old girl who speaks five languages, including Japanese. All these segments had nothing to connect them but the waffly narration of actor Martin Clunes.

If he’d read the script in his badtempered, sarcastic Doc Martin voice, the show could have been much more fun. Instead, this was cheap, forgettable froth.

Versailles (BBC2) must have cost a thousand times more to make, but all the French have got for their mountains of eurocash is diamondcrusted claptrap.

After last week’s frenzy of sex scenes, the titillation factor drooped lower — just a knee-trembler for the king and his mistress during a dress-fitting, and some young women flouncing in their nighties through a fountain, for reasons that weren’t explained.

Anyway, there was a dead dwarf in the water, which was a right passion-killer.

Instead of sex, we were bombarded with bad taste, including a full recital of the Lord’s Prayer, intercut with the murder of a housemaid. Censors recently banned the broadcast of these words, the most important in Christian liturgy, in cinemas.

Presumably the BBC thinks it’s acceptable to recite the prayer on screen, providing it is spattered with violence.

Most other scenes appear to have been copied from 17th-century paintings. Men in lace sleeves stand self-consciously with their fingers poised on tables. Every courtier is arranged so the camera can see him in half-profile, and no one budges from his mark.

This technique worked very well for Rembrandt. If the master painter had tried to capture a moving tableaux, his oils would have blurred on the canvas.

No doubt Versailles is supposed to look like a series of classic paintings, but the effect is as lifeless as a museum display.

George Blagden as Louis XIV continues to be the least charismatic man ever to take the lead in a costume drama.

With his bulging eyes and habit of staring at the floor for minutes, he looks like a sheep that has wandered into the palace and wonders where all the grass has gone.