I’ve tried for as long as possible to have nothing to say about Chris Langham. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I want to avoid chucking a damp log onto the witch-burning that all the sanctimonious, tumbrel-cheering, casually vicious, joyously judgmental columnists have been stoking. But he’s gone and turned up in my manor with Pamela Connolly, in her dumbly and unpleasantly titled series, Shrink Rap (Tuesday, More4). Here was a writer and comedian who once played a psychotherapist on television, talking to an actor and comedian he once worked with who really is a television psychotherapist. It doesn’t get more circular than that.

I rarely watch Connolly shrink-rapping show-business mates and dull bods plugging records/movies/ books with trite autoflagellation, because I think that, generally, celebrity self-revelation is shallow and dull, and they plainly enjoy talking about themselves in the third person about as much as I don’t enjoy listening to them. As far as this one went, I hope Langham got something out of his chat with the therapist.

What interested me was not him, but her. Who does she think she looks like? How on earth does someone who claims to have professional insight and training into emotion, motivation and behaviour wear a little girl’s hairdo? It’s too blonde to be serious, and too cute, with a little jailbait fringe. It’s the sort of hair you see in northern nightclubs on grab-a-granny night. There’s something spooky and Baby Janeish about her, with her knowing little childlike act, played by a middle-aged chubby woman. The voice gets slightly whiny when eliciting salacious detail. “What sort of abuse are we talking about, exactly?” she mews, like a hungry cat.

This programme is no different from the hysterical tabloid revelations of Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle. It is dredged from the same gutter; dressing it up as medical is specious. One-to-one therapy is traditionally based on trust and secrecy. Doing it in front of a television audience isn’t healing or usefullyrevealing, it’s voyeuristic entertainment of the muckiest sort. There isn’t even the fig leaf of justification that this might demystify therapy and encourage the miserable to make an appointment. It degrades and trivialises a profession that is already muddy with mistrust.

I wish Langham well. He’s a talented man who has been pilloried and humiliated beyond justification or endurance. The argument against looking at criminal pornography on screen is that viewing it doesn’t just condone it, but encourages its production. And that’s pretty much what I feel about Shrink Rap.

City of Vice(Monday, C4) is one of those utterly brilliant concepts that make you want to high-five your remote control: a detective series set in the 18th century, with Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, as a magistrate, and his blind brother, John, also a magistrate, playing detectives with the newly formed Bow Street Runners.

It had the potential for a proper costume drama – that is, real drama with clothes on – in a properly exciting setting and time. But concepts often overwhelm their productions, and so it was with this one. The story was underwhelming and about as plodding and dull as you can make the serial killing of prostitutes in turkish baths.

I surmise the problem here is that social archeology has come before suspense and character, so that what we got was a cop show produced by the Time Team, when really what we wanted was CSI: The Great Wen. The cast made the most of what they were given, which was pretty thin. Iain Glen is the most farsighted blind detective since Dick Tracy. It was desperately underwritten for character, plot and motivation, but myopically overexplanatory when it came to 18th-century municipal structures. But I hope they don’t throw the book out with the bookcase: the idea needs to be more Holmes and Watson, with a dose of The Sweeney in wigs. And if the thought of that doesn’t make you want to stay in with a curry and a butt of sack, then you don’t deserve a telly.

Lark Rise to Candleford(Sunday, BBC1): the very title makes you want to run amok with a rifle. These are names from toffee tins, full of rural whimsy. Episode one was the story of whether a hamlet (Lark Rise) was more or less than eight miles from the nearest post office (Candleford), told exhaustively over an hour as if it were the discovery of the double helix or preparations for D-day, with a sub-Hardyesque, turgid bosky-ness, if you can imagine anything sub-Hardyesque.

If this is the sort of thing you want from yourtele-vision, I really don’t know what you’re doing reading a magazine plainly and boldly entitled Culture, because all this culture stuff must come as a ghastly and shocking surprise to you. What you want is so obviously from another planet; and if fretting about the distance between hamlets weren’t enough, it also featured Dawn French being the vicar of Dibley as a drunken, feckless leech on her neighbours – well, just the vicar of Dibley, in fact. It was a piece of casting that stuck out of the amiably adequate troupe of doll’s-house thespians like a short, fat, loud comedian doing a turn in the middle of a dull costume drama.

The Palace(Monday, ITV1) is a fabulous piece of tacky kitsch, a thinly disguised, oh-who-are-they-kidding send-up of the house of Windsor; Heat meets Debrett’s. Actually, it was rather too tame, but promising. It needed to be more Footballers’ Wives and less Mills & Boon. It couldn’t make up its mind whether to be intentionally, camply sneery and sniggery or just boldly melodramatic. There was too much plot and too little character. And it had the misfortune to start in the week that Diana’s inquest revelations left reality’s orbit and went beyond parody.

But I bet this will be widely watched by the royal family and that collection of liggers and toadies who consider themselves a court. They will laugh knowingly at the mistakes in protocol, the slightly off, hooray argot, because the greatest pleasure of the residual ruling class is to notice faux pas in the increasingly rare portraits of themselves on the screen. It’s a thin, mocking little amusement that happily prevents them from having to think about the context or the possibly uncomfortable truth contained in the drama.

Whether you think The Palace an amusing satire in the manner of Rowlandson, or a tasteless mockery of our head of state, who can’t answer back, consider the impossibility of making any sort of drama about the royal family in which they appear as clever, heroic, admirable, romantic or likeable.

News at Tenis back on ITV1. Not to be confused with the Ten O’Clock News. And finally, it poses the question: what is Trevor McDonald for? What was he ever for? And whoever told him he’d be good on television in the first place? He’s the British Johnny Hallyday – an utterly useless national treasure.

Editor's choice

• Burning Bush with W
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• Boy George on sex, drugs and Amy Winehouse