The Royal (ITV1); Fungus The Bogeyman (BBC1); The Medici: Godfathers Of The Renaissance (C4):

Here comes the bride. And, hang on a minute, there goes the bride. She's legged it back up the aisle and out of the door of the church. And what's more, the bridegroom and many of the congregation have followed her.

The Royal wedding of the year ended in pandemonium - or Scarborough, to be more accurate. Drs Jill Weatherill and Gordon Ormerod's big day was disrupted by a big bang that wasn't the sound of champagne corks popping.

The pair were about to tie the knot when the ceremony was halted by exploding pensioners. One of the seaside town's homes for the elderly had gone bang after one inmate had put his head in the gas oven after a visit from young Dr Goodwin, who barely looks old enough to shave, let wield a stethoscope.

Poor Mr Calder was a vegetarian but the nasty old trout running Shoreview Care Home kept giving him meat to eat. Hence his suicide attempt and gas explosion.

The incident left 12 elderly people dead and a further 32 injured and badly shaken. This was hardly what we expected from the feelgood Heartbeat spin-off based around St Aidan's Hospital in the 1960s. I certainly didn't anticipate seeing close-ups of bedsores that looked like Mount Vesuvius in full eruption.

Hopefully, this tragedy was merely to attract our attention as the series returned. Perhaps next week normal service will be resumed with lots of minor personal dramas, Matron being as starchy as her bonnet, someone suffering from the disease of the week and the whole thing tied together with songs from the Sixties.

One thing that hadn't changed, I was glad to see, was surgeon Mr Rose whose pipe remained clamped between his teeth at all times, like someone had Superglued it there.

All very unhygienic. Conditions are cleaner than in the home of Fungus The Bogeyman, the Raymond Briggs novel being given the Sunday teatime treatment by the BBC.

Bogeydom has been visited by a "dry cleaner", as humans are called by the stinking green people. But they're hospitable and offer visitor Jessica some water. "Sieve the lumps out first," instructed Mildew.

Back in the 15th Century, the Medicis were welcoming to artists such as Botticelli. He repaid the debt to patron Lorenzo Medici by putting the Medici family in his painting The Adoration Of The Magi, we discovered in the C4 documentary series.

Lorenzo, the godfather of Southern Italy, established the first school of art and took a special interest in a precocious young talent working in marble at an age when most boys were playing marbles. His name, and you may have heard of him, was Michelangelo. As a boy, he was taken into the Medici palace and grew up alongside Lorenzo's seven children.

When Lorenzo became ill, the treatment was a concoction of pulverised pearls and precious stones, which isn't something you get at St Aidan's.

The medicine didn't work and when Lorenzo died, a Dominican monk who disliked the family business and artistic licence, instigated the removal of all the accessories of Medici's renaissance. Books were burned, along with fancy clothes, wigs and paintings. It became known as the Bonfire of the Vanities. You learn something every night on TV.

Published: 06/12/2004