They eff you up, your mum and dad, wrote Larkin intemperately, when all the evidence is that the process is collaborative, equal and opposite. Take some of the effed-up parents on Help! My Kid's a Rock Star, Helen Sage's One Life documentary for BBC One. The easiest to dislike was an articulate cynic named Hank Harrison, father of Courtney Love. Aged 14, she contacted him from what he generously described as a “private borstal school”. He was disappointed by her clothing, her posture and her inability to mash potatoes. “She could not drive a car,” he added. Sage pointed out she was only 14. Never mind that, Hank would have got her behind a wheel aged 12 - if only, that was, they had not by then been estranged for a decade.

But the griping was entirely mutual and continues to this day between the songstress and the man she calls, not inaccurately, Fat Daddy. She once wrote that every time she looked in the mirror she saw Hank's face, adding: “I think I am going to have to get more plastic surgery.” Sage asked if he still cared for her. He said he couldn't since she was not a “real person” any more. Fat Daddy pondered the possibility of a rapprochement but concluded it would be like negotiating peace in Iraq.

Sad Daddy was Blackie Dammett, who gave the most lachrymose interview I have seen for years. Named, perhaps, after his hair dye, he had sired Anthony Kiedis of Red Hot Chili Peppers. After a childhood of parental abuse, Blackie was determined to treat his boy to the good stuff, namely “debauchery, drugs and beautiful women” and they became identically dressed partners in crime. Wanting Anthony to be the first in his class to have sex - not, like him, the last - Blackie even procured his boy a nice blonde from the local bar and grill for the purpose.

Unfortunately, his generosity extended to drugs and Mini Him became a heroin addict. Years later, in a heated rehab session, the kid turned on him. Things eventually came good, however, and Anthony now showers his child-father with cars and houses. The women in his life had all been ephemeral, Blackie explained. It was different with Anthony. “You never fall out of love with your son and obviously I never will, and I am sure he feels the same way.” Sniff. Sniff. “Now pass me a Kleenex.”

There were some likeable parents, too. Mitch Winehouse, Amy's dad, held up his hands to cowardice for keeping both a wife and a mistress on the go for the first ten years of Amy's life, thus forging an example of dishonesty. And you had to feel for Asher D's mum, determined her son would break her community's cycle of failure and so pleased when he joined a band rather than a gang. How could she know that So Solid Crew would soon be the most antisocial rappers in Britain and her boy would be jailed for 18 months for gun possession? I am not sure if this documentary was about pop or parenting, but to adapt D.W.Winnicott's useful concept of the “good enough parent”, this was a good enough documentary.

The Diets that Time Forgot (Channel 4), in contrast, struggled to eke a programme - nay a six-part reality series - out of a format probably conceived over a very long lunch indeed. The idea is that nine overweight volunteers are confined in a country house and subjected to the dietary fads of the Victorians (cold mutton for breakfast), the Edwardians (chew everything 32 times) and the Twenties (the decade calorie counting came in). Rather than analyse how these diets might work, the programme kept interrupting itself to get its contestants to perform party games: deportment lessons one day, dressing up in fancy dress the next.

The volunteers were not well cast, being too polite and subservient. (Can someone tell me where I have seen Dave, the chirpy 15st meter reader before?) Sir Roy Strong presides as the dean of the imaginary college and affects verbose disgust at his pupils' bodies. I was vaguely surprised that the former V&A director was still up for this sort of thing, but medical tests revealed that although his real age is 72, his “metabolic age”, judged by the fat around his inner organs, is a mere 57. His charges' chronological ages, mean while, add up to 324, but, metabolically, to a stroke-risking, diabetes-inducing 451. Sir Roy can afford to sneer.

OUT OF THE BOX

Sir Alan Sugar may have the power to hire and fire on The Apprentice, which returns next week, but not over commissioning his next show for the BBC. At a press conference to launch the new series yesterday, he revealed that he could get no one to listen to his plan for a schoolkids' version of the show. “I thought it would be a one-off blockbuster in the early evening,” he said, although he feared what the press would say if he started firing 12-year- olds. Asked who he would most like to fire he replied Heather Mills - “She's Long John Silver's great granddaughter.”

Also there was Apprentice You're Fired presenter Adrian Chiles who told me he had still not decided on ITV's offer to make him their face of sport. “Success is hard,” he said. “It is much easier when you are still climbing the greasy pole.” Tell that to the apprentices.

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