What strikes you initially about Sir Trevor McDonald’s interview with Prince Charles in The Prince of Wales: Up Close (ITV1) is not so much that the Savile-Row-suited man with the plummiest voice in Britain has deigned to take time out of his busy schedule, sit himself down on a sofa in Clarence House in London, and conduct a conversation with the Prince of Wales.

No, it’s the opening monologue, when you hear the Prince of Wales confessing, “From the age of 10 I’ve been in trouble with the law.” Really? “I started off stealing from small shops, then on to bigger stores and armed robbery. This, to me, was normal.” Had you any idea? “At the age of 15 I was put into a secure unit.” Was Gordonstoun that bad? “It was a college of crime. I learnt how to break into houses better. I learnt how to steal cars better. I’d never had any qualification. No-one had ever given me the chance. From stealing I went on to hard drugs. I loved them! They couldn’t answer me back.” What a scoop ITV1 had on its hands here.

But as the camera panned back it turned out that the heir to the throne was reading out a letter from one of the many troubled- now-transformed youths who have benefited from the cash, and the belief, invested in them by the Prince’s Trust, whose 30th anniversary this documentary celebrates. Is it possible the director could not have noticed how enticing it sounded to hear such words spilling from the Prince of Wales’s mouth? Would anyone care to place a bet on how long it might be before snippets of that speech turn up on, say, Have I Got News for You?

Prince Charles could not have come across more glowingly if he had made this documentary himself. But then, I suppose, why shouldn’t he? The Prince’s Trust doesn’t appear to do anything bad, and it seems to do a huge amount of good, helping thousands of young people on whom society, and banks, have turned their backs. It helps them to start businesses, or rock bands, or design consultancies, or just to begin a new life free of crime and drugs.

The Queen’s son looks not only satisfied with the Trust’s achievements, he looks genuinely happy, for perhaps the first time in his life: happily re-married and happily joshing with his two sons. He no longer seems to ooze that Gordon Brown brand of itchiness to replace his mother on the throne. In the Prince’s Trust he has an achievement of which he presumably feels he can be proud, although it’s not clear why its work of helping youngsters escape crime, drugs, disadvantaged backgrounds and a sense of aimlessness isn’t being done by a government department. Oh yes, now I remember why! Because government ministers are too busy treating their civil servants like Monica Lewinskys; and forgetting to deport foreign criminals.

And when Prince Charles mentioned that Britain’s press was often hasty in condemning some youths as thugs and hoodies, was there a personal echo when he told Sir Trevor that, “I was trying to make the point: don’t be misled entirely by appearances, which is very easy to do.”?

If you were going out of your way to pick faults, then you might wonder at some of the Trust’s choices for its celebrity ambassadors. Gwyneth Paltrow, who is one of them, said of Charles: “He’s such a socially conscious man, and I think he understands that the future of a country relies on its youth.” Well, maybe he does. But how can you take seriously the words of anyone who chose Coldplay’s Chris Martin as the father of her children?

The Ealing Comedy farce recounted in Who Stole the World Cup (Channel 4) was so full of clichéd Cockney wide boys, small- time crooks out of their depth, chain-smoking policemen even further out of their depth, dopey security guards having a tea break while someone walked off with the Jules Rimet trophy, and implausible plot twists that it could have been a film devised by Guy Ritchie: only a lot more entertaining than an actual Guy Ritchie film, obviously.

The oddest part of this deliciously cheesy whodunnit (“Save it for the station,” barks a detective arresting a suspect, in one of the many dramatic reconstructions, as if he were in an episode of Z Cars), is that we still don’t know whodunnit. It’s like a miniature Kennedy conspiracy; only without Lee Harvey Oswald. Or a grassy knoll. Or a portentous Oliver Stone film. The middleman sent down for demanding money for the trophy’s return died shortly after leaving prison. Pickles, the dog that found the trophy under a bush, died a year later after choking on its own lead. And England has never won the World Cup since. Spooky, huh?

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