True Dare Kiss BBC One

Wasn’t it Nietzsche who once said that family love is like bad wallpaper – messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern? You wonder what the old misery would have made of today’s TV family sagas, because in many ways they back up his aphorism.

Cultural wisdom has it that all stories can be boiled down to one of seven basic ideas. If there is an archetype for family dramas it would seem to relate to the fighting between folk who really ought to love each other. Take any Forsyte Saga, Dallas or Dynasty and it’s all about the arguments, rivalries, jealousies, divided loyalties, guilt, secrets and lies. But this can mean there’s that “annoying and repetitive pattern”, too.

Only last week, Channel 4’s latest US biggie Brothers & Sisters kicked off with a tense family get-together and a dead patriarch. The great Six Feet Under began with a similarly uneasy reunion thanks to the father’s sudden demise. That cosy Sunday-night hogwash The Chase recently returned with the all-shagging clan gathering at the old man’s funeral. And last night there was Debbie Horsfield’s True Dare Kiss, in which alienated siblings were reunited when. . . the dad kicked the bucket. Note to scriptwriters: guys, give the dad a break!

Horsfield’s family drama clearly had work to do stamping out its own ground. Skilfully, it introduced some darkly arresting characters and came steeped in a kind of low-level anxiety that nagged at you. With each of five siblings harbouring their own repressed neurosis, it was clear that some nasty great skeleton was jangling away in the cupboard, preparing to burst out. This is the scriptwriter’s trump card – proffer the viewer clues to a disturbing revelation. It’s a bit like Gordon Brown being spotted wearing nail varnish. You’d demand to know more.

There were some impressive shoulder chips on display. Nita seethed with barely contained jealousy of pretty, prodigal sister Phil. Jittery Alice was a walking panic attack, while the strident pub bore Beth drenched her woes in Special Brew, falling about legless and bawling out Manchester United terrace chants, just in case we hadn’t worked out which city we were in.

Which just left the petulant brother – a lugubrious, mascara-wearing oddity (imagine a camp boxer dog) – who skulked in the decaying family home, Manchester’s answer to the Addams Family Mansion. In wallpaper terms this unruly quintet would be like peeling Anaglypta, peculiar enough to set up the series with a saturnine identity of its own. It was a gritty British antidote to Calista Flockhart’s polished angst in Brothers & Sisters, and an even darker sibling to Horsfield’s previous Mancunian-women-in-crisis drama, Cutting It.

At one point, the brother muttered mordantly: “Ladies and gentlemen, the fun starts here”. Whether the plunge into these screw-ups’ psyches offers edge-of-your-seat emotional fireworks or descends into an ordeal of mardy navel-gazing remains to be seen. But so far, so good – whatever Nietzsche would have thought.

Fictional TV families may be hotbeds of hang-ups and crises but, as is noted with tedious inevitability none can compare with the soap operatics within our most famous real-life clan: the Windsors. Princes William and Harry are going to be everywhere you look on TV over the next few days. But if they were watching Sky One last night, they would have been confronted by the most ludicrous perspective yet on their already out-there lives.

Wills and Harry Go to Vegas Sky One

Wills and Harry Go to Vegas featured a pair of dead-on lookalikes wandering about Sin City in what was billed as a comical attempt to shed light on what average Americans think of the royals but, judging from my short preview copy, it seemed more to do with having a laugh at them “gullible Yanks”. Setting the experiment in the most wacko city on the planet meant such Anglocentric sneering wasn’t exactly going to be hard.

What did the locals think of “the world’s most eligible bachelors?”? Considering that the princes were wandering around with the insolent comic Iain Lee, lording over things wildly as their imperious aide, they mostly seemed to concur “not a lot”. You could understand. There are rumours that Wills and Harry are being approached to make an appearance on American Idol. If you want to know Americans’ real reaction to our princes, leave it to Simon Cowell. james.jackson@thetimes.co.uk

Grumbles in the jungle

Tribal Wives, a new BBC Two show for the autumn, will have six British women living in remote communities. An insider has been reported as saying: “It will have all the friction of Wife Swap but with better scenery”. Ray Mears started this trend for stunt-anthropology, Bruce Parry and Donal MacIntyre have taken it further, while Discovery’s Last Man Standing features gladiatorial tribe wrestling. Someone has to put a stop to this irresponsible culture-shock TV before we have Tribe’s Got Talent (featuring a ventriloquist with a real monkey), How Clean is Your Hut? and, of course, Amazon Big Brother – “day three and it’s 40 minutes since Makosi sniffed a powerful hallucinogen”. Actually . . .

Flashmob goes naked

The BBC’s previous “flashmob” programmes have involved surprise bursts of opera on railway concourses. The next one will feature hundreds of women stripping naked in public. Why? It’s a “celebration of the true female form”. Nothing to do with being a ratings stunt, of course.

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