Any attempt to conjoin the name Diana, Princess of Wales with the c-word in a single sentence is almost certainly doomed to prove more trouble than its worth. I am tempted nevertheless. Five’s Diana: Last Days of a Princess and BBC Three’s The C Word: How We Came to Swear by It both dealt with subjects that provoke unreasonably strong reactions, veneration in the case of the former, offence in the latter’s. Yet both are gradually being reclaimed as subjects for rational discussion – hence yesterday’s programmes, both of which sounded like ratings grabs but turned out to be useful rather than meretricious.

Diana was a curious hybrid of documentary and drama, as if the director Richard Dale did not have total confidence in the credence people would give to the writer Jenny Lecoat’s dialogue and felt he had to show his research. It was like watching a very glossy soap being interrupted with pop-up footnotes. The most interesting contributor was Dodi Fayed’s bodyguard Kez Wingfield, who painted a vivid picture of the nightmare of protecting the love birds during their fantasy romance, a month made tolerable only by the camaraderie he built up with his opposite number, Trevor Rees-Jones. Another approach might have resulted in Diana: The Bodyguards’ Story. No man is a hero to his bodyguard.

In fact the script was fine, its theme being that Diana and Dodi’s relationship never had a chance. The princess, emerging from the horror of her divorce, dreamt mutually exclusive dreams, of privacy and publicity, hedonism and public influence. By the time she met Dodi on his father’s yacht, she was ready both for a glamorous holiday and the mischievous headlines it would generate for her tabloid war with “the Germans”.

As the princess, Genevieve O’Reilly was better at portraying her mercuriality than her charm. As for her looks – well I congratulate O’Reilly, as I congratulate Diana’s shade, on not blushing as lines such as “I must say I had forgotten how extraordinarily beautiful you are” were hurled at her.

It was even harder to accept David Brent’s boss as the playboy Dodi Fayed, especially since Patrick Baladi’s mid-Mediterranean accent slipped about so much that I thought it might fall into it. But he is a watchable, subtle actor and excellent at portraying dense. Dodi had reached middle age in a gilded cage that excluded common sense. Diana wanted a man she could trust: he gave her jewellery. She wanted to be affirmed as a person; he wanted to “show her off” to his mate Bruce Willis. He imagined she wanted to be alone; she was forever tipping off the press, thus ensuring they never were.

There was another problem, the three people in this relationship: Diana, Dodi and Dodi’s dad, who gave his son as much leeway as Gepetto did Pinocchio. Mohamed was one of the programme’s talking heads. He must have hoped it would show his family in a more flattering light than is customary. It fuggin’ didn’t.

Talking of which, the British comedian Will Smith spent much of The C Wordspeculating on why queynte (as Chaucer spelled it) had replaced the f-word as the Worst Word Of Them All. The reason, of course, is that it offends two constituencies at once, the fuddy-duddy and the feminist. Dee Ensler, who wrote The Vagina Monologues, had a go at tutoring Smith in using the word as a term of lavish praise. She seemed to think words could mean what she wanted them to mean but the columnist Zoe Williams put her right: you cannot demand the word be used only as a hallelujah to the flower of your womanhood; like all words, its meaning had been decided through collective use.

Smith, I felt, got away with repeating it so often partly because of his gently posh, David Cameronish manner. He duly got distracted by the issue of class for a while, arguing that the word was seeping from the upper and lower classes into the middle. Actually, it is being used more because it is gradually causing less offence and that is partly because we are becoming less fuddy-duddy and partly because feminism, a victim of its own success and apathy, is no longer the cause it was. According to the youths he spoke to, down on the streets, it is already being replaced by “pussy” – although even pussy is not as incendiary as the n-word. But that’s another programme.

Out of the box

— A website, reportr.net, directs me to maybe the worst TV interview ever. Merry Miller of ABC’s What the Buzz? is talking to actress Holly Hunter about her new series, Saving Grace, which Merry, to judge from the number of times she tells Holly “we love the show”, appears to believe is already on air. It becomes clear that the former beauty queen has no idea what it is about or, indeed, who Hunter is. Viewable on YouTube, the clip should serve as a warning to any future Miss Dallas who fancy themselves an easy career in TV.

— Reader Andy Rooney answers the question I asked about why a fan pushing hot air around makes a room cooler. It doesn’t. “It makes you cooler by increasing the rate of evaporation of moisture from your skin. Leaving a fan running in an empty room is just a waste of energy.” Thanks, Andy. Cool.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010