Poor Peter Fincham, controller of BBC1. Well, actually, not poor Peter. Quite comfortable Peter, thank you for asking, after selling a wallet-bursting slice of Talkback. He doesn’t need to do this job, you know. It’s only because he wants to give a little back, to put the public service back in broadcasting. Smiling through the pain of being interrogated on Newsnight over the national tragedy of Betty Windsor being asked to take off her alice band by an American lesbian on national television and the humiliation of being shown walking out in a huff instead of walking in in a huff, Fincham mea-culpa-ed like Maria to the mother superior, his fingers blindly signing the international distress signal for “Mummy, come and get me”.

If anyone really, really wasn’t to blame in this most nebulous and insignificant of gases, it was Fincham. The mileage and umbrage made out of an incident so laughably, pathetically unimportant are the stuff of bad sitcoms. What on earth did the Queen think she was doing, posing for a Vanity Fair photographer, anyway? Annie Leibovitz was doing her job, which she’s exceptionally good at. The person who was out of order and behaving like a spoilt starlet was the Queen. If you don’t want to be told what to do by photographers, then don’t be photographed. Why was she behaving like a film star? Demi Moore and Uma Thurman pose only if they are selling something. What was Her Maj selling? “My new production is a small country off the coast of Europe. It’s fab. Loads of laughs. Lots of excitement.” No, what the Queen was selling is what she has always been selling: monarchy. She’s not flogging our best interests, she’s selling the hereditary principle ltd. She’s publicising the brand of Queen.

As for the other thing, the BBC editing heresy and the Fincham show trial, well, the corporation needs to grow up and get a lot tougher. It rolled over in front of Hutton and is far too quick to see itself as culpable and a victim. The BBC needs to stop conniving in its own bullying. It looks masochistic. A free and independent broadcaster isn’t a navel-gazing, people-pleasing, self-mortifying one. It needs to stop wearing the “kick-me” pants and realise its responsibility and its privilege and stop being terrified of PRs, MPs and Wednesday columnists. What it is and does is too important, because one day its supine pacifism will let someone do it real damage. And then we’ll all be sorry. In a straight choice, which does more for the country, at home and abroad – the BBC or the monarchy? You don’t even have to think about it. Peter Fincham or Prince Edward? No contest.

Which leads us at a quick march to Guarding the Queen (Tuesday), ITV1’s new fly-on-the-wall documentary series about the soldiers who think they’re guarding the Queen but are, in fact, selling tickets to Mary Poppins, British Airways and cream teas. Their bearskins and red coats are paid for by the tourist board. This style of reality show has an overfamiliar tone to it, invented by the BBC for august institutions: museums, the National Trust, Kew Gardens and the Queen. You take three or four characters and weave their stories together, inserting golden statements of profound insignificance. “There’s only a week to go before the most important day in Jeremy’s life.” “It’s raining and Stella feels the weight of responsibility. There are 1,000 sequins left.” Behind it all is a rousing and lachrymose soundtrack. The Grenadier Guards are an easy sell, and this programme was made as well as any. You might think that broadcasting an uncritical and nostalgically sugared series about the army in the middle of two wars would be open to criticism of being recklessly jingoistic. But leave that aside. A posting to Afghanistan was treated with the same reverentially measured curator’s tone as guard mounting at the Tower of London. There was one brilliant moment when a central-casting bad lad, who got into fights, had found a sense of purpose, responsibility and self-respect in the regiment. He passed through training and went to guard St James’s Palace. His mother took his sister to see him. The little girl went and stood beside him. He was made of stone, standing to attention: his face didn’t flicker. The child slipped her hand into his and the camera caught what nobody watching would have noticed: the faintest movement. He gave it a squeeze. It was an instance of pure Victorian pathos. No other medium can sell sentiment like that without cynicism or irony. I would be astonished if that moment didn’t recruit a couple of hundred poor lads to the colours. In the autumn, the BBC is doing the Household Cavalry. I can barely wait.

Bettany Hughes is back. We last saw her being Helen or Penelope or Electra, one of the classic Spice Girls, in a series that was so bereft of things to look at, we were forced to stare at Bettany almost continuously without blinking. And it was hard to escape the ungallant conclusion that the fact Bettany is a bit of a babe had something to do with her presenting programmes that didn’t have much to look at. This time, she’s trying to tell us, in Athens – The Truth About Democracy (Saturday, C4), that Athens and democracy weren’t all they were cracked up to be. I’m not sure this premise necessarily works. Anyone who has ever been to Athens knows it’s one of the most ghastly cities in Europe. And most of us who live in long-term democracies think they are a terrible bore. Churchill pointed out that democracy was a ridiculous system to decide the course of nations. It was just better than all the other options.

Bettany jogged around telling us that Athenians weren’t as decent or as democratic as we imagined. We, in turn, told her we’d never thought that much about them in the first place and, when we did think about them, we thought they were mostly gay paedophiles who wore miniskirts and sandals. As I watched Bettany, because there was nothing much else to watch, I got the distinct sense that she is oversensitive about her bum. There were a lot of knee-length jackets and untucked shirts and three-quarter poses. You know it’s a mistake, Bettany. Trinny would tell you, you’re just drawing attention to it. And it’s true. You do have a bum that makes the Gordian knot look like a telephone-wire tangle. But, don’t worry, we’re not looking at it. Honest. We’re really interested in what you have to say about the single transferable vote and committee decisions in 3rd-century-BC Greece.

The Visit (Sunday, BBC3) is a comedy about prison. I’m amazed there aren’t more dramas, funny or not, about incarceration. There is far more theatre in prison than in police stations. What happens after you’re nicked is more interesting than the crime that got you nicked. The Visit reminded me of Porridge, in that I remembered how good Porridge was by comparison. This was all feeble setups, telegraphed punch lines and one-dimensional characters, spinning effortlessly in their own wind. It had no sense of prison being anything more than a device for keeping all your actors in one room. The writers should get in more, or talk to someone who got a life.

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