The Dobsons of Duncraig (BBC1); X-Rated: The Films That Shocked Britain (five): IT seemed a good idea at the time, as various strands of the Dobson family bought a Scottish castle for half a million pounds.

The plan was to renovate it to provide accommodation for family members and income from paying guests. A neat, simple idea that didn't take into account the fact that the family that plays together doesn't so much stay together as have lots of arguments.

Ten months after buying the property, it wasn't the leaking roof or clapped out central heating system that was the problem, but the continuing conflict between brothers Sam and Greg. They weren't so much disagreeing as refusing to speak to each other.

It seemed only a matter of time before they occupied separate wings of the castle and refused to come out.

The conflict made for watchable TV but you couldn't help feel that they should have sorted out their personal differences before embarking on the ambitious scheme.

The problem was easy to see. Sam and partner Perlin saw it as a business venture, part of their successful property portfolio. Greg and wife Elfin viewed it as a change of lifestyle, swapping Leicester for the countryside so their three sons could grow up away from the pressures of the inner city.

Money, need it be said, was the cause. Sam and Perlin had put in more money than Greg and Elfin and so, naturally enough you might think, had more say in what happened. The brothers seemed unable to talk to each other and discuss their problems like normal human beings. No wonder father Alan was beginning to despair.

When the brothers finally talked of burying the hatchet, you feared it would be in each other's heads.

Sex, rather than violence, was at the heart of X-Rated which, according to your standpoint, was either a serious attempt to examine the big screen's treatment of sex over the past five decades or an excuse to show smutty excerpts from X-rated movies.

It was The 100 Greatest Dirty Movie Moments rather than a South Bank Show expose of the rise, if you'll pardon the expression, of cinematic sex. All the same, I was glad to be reminded of some of the milestones in cinema sex - and I don't mean groping in the back row - since the board of film censors passed the first X film in 1952.

What looked explicit then looks perfectly innocuous now. I liked director Ken Russell's story about a screening of Women In Love, with its taboo-breaking scene of Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling in the nude. The audience at a screening in a fleapit in Devon consisted of just two old ladies. As the two naked men lay panting on the floor, one of the old dears turned to the other and said: "Lovely carpet".

Published: 10/12/2004