Fallen idols

Charlie is looking the worse for wear. He has a gaping hole in his neck and his genitals are darker in colour than the rest of his body because people keep touching them.

Earlier, a group of women had gathered around his naked body and flipped him over onto his front to admire his pert bottom. And he's legless. Literally. They've been snapped off and sold off as scrap metal. Who'd be a naked Roman bronze?

Not that he doesn't have admirers. Metals conservator Alex treats him as a real person because there's no one quite like him. He's the only one in the British Museum and is treated accordingly.

She's restoring him with meticulous care as we see in The Museum, a peep behind the doors of "one of the greatest shows on earth" and a "history hotspot", namely the British Museum in London.

The series could be as boring as watching paint dry, or in Alex's case, watching someone scrape corrosion off bronze Charlie. Once a god, he'd been demoted to an item of furniture - an upmarket candlestick - when the museum bought him in 1840.

Alex admits she spends a lot of time up Charlie's orifices as part of the restoration project. In the past, curators attempted to make him presentable by painting him black and giving him artificial legs. These days, they like to restore what's there. So the paint's been removed, along with the legs.

Alex has even made a mould to plug the hole in his neck. By the time he's mounted on a new plinth, he looks more like the noble Roman he once was.

I am reminded of Roman scandals by Saddam's Tribe, which looks at the fall of the Iraq dictator through the eyes of his eldest daughter, Raghad.

Billed as a drama documentary, it resembles more a soapy family drama like Dallas or Dynasty but with weapons of mass destruction as well as shoulder pads.

The dictatorial father, devoted daughter, wayward eldest son, brothers vying for power - they're all here, along with corruption and mass killing.

Stanley Townsend's Saddam is a man to be feared, even if he was a family man who always insisted on holding a big family party on his birthday. "He loved a good party, however busy he was with affairs of state," says Raghad in her voiceover.

She also notes that he thought she was the wisest of his children, but a woman and therefore had no place in politics.

The drama documentary is good at having her say one thing while showing us something contradictory. Saddam's eldest son Uday is keen to follow his father into politics, she tells us, as we view Uday torturing a prisoner with an electric prod.

Her father was misunderstood, she says, doing what he had to do to hold the country together. Cue scenes of Saddam ordering the torture and death of his critics.

It's a case of the family that slays together, stays together. Uday (a marvellously unhinged performance by Daniel Mays) produces a gun at the dinner table and tells Raghad's son: "When I was your age, dad used to let me shoot the prisoners".

We hardly need newsreel footage of real events to show what was happening in Iraq. The intimate, emotional rollercoaster of those within Saddam's family more than demonstrates the horror and injustice of his reign of terror.

Woe betide anyone who criticised his family, even off-his-head Uday. That general really should have known better than to suggest that he couldn't even run a football team let alone a government ministry.

Most of the policemen in The Last Detective couldn't pick up a clue if it jumped up and slapped them across the face. Only Peter Davison's DI "Dangerous" Davies has the faintest idea of how to solve a case.

The murder of a hermit, found decaying in a chair in his front room, occupied his thoughts. It led him into the world of pornography, snuff movies and guest stars - Celia Imrie, Jeff Rawle and Hywel Bennett among them - going from series to series in search of employment.