Looking For Victoria (BBC1): STATING that Queen Victoria is "something of a passion" for Prunella Scales is a bit of an understatement.

To have the actress investigate her life and times at this particular moment seems strangely apt as yet another royal crisis involving a princess, her sons and a butler unfolds. Back in 1819, the royals were also having problems with their public image.

The monarchy was at its lowest ebb, with the public losing respect for members of the royal family and the monarchy itself. George III was insane and his son's heir had died. The future of the kings and queens of England rested on the mad monarch's sisters (no good, they were spinsters or childless) or seven brothers (who had 57 illegitimate children between them but not a single legitimate heir to the throne).

From among this bunch of "dedicated lechers", the Duke of Kent took it upon himself to do his bit for king and country. He looked among the minor European royals for a wife, plumping for a "stout German princess". Today, of course, he could have gone on a royal version of Blind Date to find a companion.

Nine months later, the job was done - a daughter was born. But, as Scales revealed during her tour of palaces and castles talking to experts, Victoria's childhood was not a happy one. Her father died when she was only a few months old, and her relationship with her mother was "not on a comfortable footing".

What aided the presenter here, as in the stage show about the Queen she's been performing for 20 years, was the fact that Victoria kept a private diary from the age of 13 and wrote a memoir of her childhood. Think how much The Mirror would have paid for the publication rights.

As well as Scales driving around in an open-top car, scarf blowing in the wind, we had reconstructions of scenes from royal life and historical figures of her time sitting around gossiping about a woman who wasn't the stern and puritanical figure she's usually painted. She wasn't a prude or harridan but a passionately temperamental and extremely intelligent person with enormous energy and, with husband Prince Albert's help, quite a bit of skill in affairs of state.

That was Scales' conclusion by the end of the first of the two programmes combining the facts of a history lesson with the insights of a psychiatrist, with a few tasty bits of scandal thrown in for good measure.

Learning that, after she came to the throne as an 18-year-old, Victoria exiled her mother to a distant wing of the newly-built Buckingham Palace was valid enough. But did we really need to know that Albert went out without any knickers under his cashmere trousers?

Both were shaped by unhappy childhoods. Scales found it "really shocking" to learn that the young Albert, a lonely and melancholy young man, never saw his mother again after she was banished from the family home when he was five. She had been having affairs. So had her husband but, as an angry Scales muttered, it was one law for the men and another for the women.

It was this type of personal reaction, together with the presenter's obvious passion for her subject, that raised this above the usual TV historical documentary. There's plenty to come, including Albert's death, the Queen's relationship with a 24-year-old Indian, and the secret of "the Queen's stallion", her highland servant John Brown.

Published: 28/10/2003