You have to be born a Jewish princess. It’s not something that you can achieve, or have thrust upon you. You have to be indulged and pampered almost from the moment you exit your mother’s womb, maybe by being slipped straight into a Prada or Pucci nappy; or else into a classic little black diaper (Yves St Laurent will not let you down) if you’ve emerged looking a little too generously cushioned in puppy fat, because black will make a baby look slimmer.

Just being rich, spoilt or having a reputation for being a little demanding, these are’t enough in themselves to earn you the accolade of being a Jewish princess. Marilyn Monroe, for instance, never managed it, even though she was rich, spoilt, demanding and became an honorary Jew on marrying Arthur Miller. Miller’s mother was notably matter-of-fact in not being cowed by Monroe’s reputation. For instance, when Miller took Monroe to meet his mother, Monroe was so anxious about having her ablutions overheard in Mrs Miller’s modest apartment that when she visited the loo she left the basin tap running hard, to mask the noise of her peeing. When Miller later asked his ma what she thought of his new girl, his mother, recalling the noise from the loo, replied that Marilyn was a lovely girl, “but she pisses like a horse!”

In Jewish Princesses (BBC One) 15 British Jewish women submitted themselves to various challengesto raise £200,000 for a children’s charity. These challenges didn’t include, as some viewers might have expected, say, letting the women loose in a roomful of single Jewish men and timing the fastest princess to identify the lawyer and the surgeon correctly. No, instead the women travelled to the Judean desert to climb mountains, cross ravines, ride camels and sleep in tents, all under the supervision of a former SAS major.

It’s a worthy enough endeavour. Forsaking their manicures for a few days presumably struck some of the princesses as being as dramatic a culture shock as they could envisage; and they all professed to having been deeply affected by the experience of being out of reach of a hairdressing salon. But don’t you wonder how many of them, when approached to join the project, didn’t ask themselves if it wouldn’t be easier just to get their father to write a cheque for their portion of the fund-raising? Isn’t that what a genuine Jewish princess would have done?

Now, have you ever watched someone win a lottery jackpot that you felt you truly deserved and hissed, “It makes you sick”? Well, it turns out you were right: winning all that money does make you sick. Alex Fraser from Edinburgh threw up at Camelot’s offices after they showed him his cheque for £8.5 million. But the most arresting thing about I’ve Won the Lottery (ITV1) was not seeing how people spent their windfalls (they share it with their children; one couple spent part of their £15 million on taking 57 Boy Scouts on a trip to Canada; Sarah Cockings bought her two sisters breast-enlargement operations), it was learning that £730 million of prize money has never been claimed since the lottery was launched in 1994.

That can’t all be down to tickets getting lost behind sofa cushions, or being turned to pulp after enduring a 40-degree wash cycle, can it? Why buy a lottery ticket, hoping to win a jackpot that might transform your life, and then not bother even to check if you’ve actually struck lucky? It’s like spending months scheming to get yourself into the same room as Halle Berry at a Hollywood party, manoeuvring close enough to her at the party to be able to charm her and ask her out to dinner, getting her to agree, and then not bothering to show up for the date. Who would behave like that? I mean, £730 million! That’s more even than the gambling debts of many Premiership footballers. It’s certainly enough to buy you every seat in the House of Lords. Who knows, it might even be sufficient to book Cherie for a brief lecture tour.

But the tears in this documentary were all tears of joy. No tales of how a jackpot win provoked resentment among family and friends, or triggered a winner’s drink-and-drugs hell. A programme that profiles only lottery winners, all gushing about how improbably happy winning several million pounds has made them, can come across like an hour-long commercial for Camelot and Lotto (it would be interesting to know if ticket sales rise for this weekend’s draw). I’ve Won the Lottery felt, at times, like a spectacular example of product placement. Maybe it could serve as a template for programme-making in an age when the internet is stealing advertising and technology enables viewers to fast-forward through commercial breaks.

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