We are halfway through this run of Bonekickers and I do wonder how many archaeological mysteries there are left for it to dumb down. Week one it was the Holy Cross, week two, just as tastelessly, the slave trade. Last night came Boadicea. Forget kicking bones, Gillian and Ben, our intrepid archaeologists from Wessex Poly, stumbled over the Queen of the Iceni's perfectly preserved body. Beneath the Roman Baths in Bath.

Grumbly Dr Gillian M, whose mother we are always being told had gone mad, normally pretends to be very rational but her theme last night was Use Your Imagination (viewers had merely to suspend theirs). She was in a very vulnerable state and the reason for this was that it was Valentine's Day - not a good day for Gillian, not since 16 years ago she proposed to Ben and Ben turned her down. Gillian's first mad theory was that Boadicea - we endured the usual lecture about her real name being Boudicca - had been held in the dungeons to be the “sex slave” of a little- known Roman soldier/inventor called Marcus Quintanus. Mosaics and graffiti, undiscovered for 2,000 years, convinced her that, on the contrary, the two had fallen desperately in love. A tear fell down Gillian's cheek and Ben almost kissed it before he remembered they were trapped down there and there was a gas leak and there was going to be a fire and all that plot stuff.

Up above in his lab, Dolly, played by Hugh Bonneville, had been flirting with an Italian archaeologist on Skype and established that Quintanus had taken revenge on the Romans for killing his foxy Boadicea by placing one of his homemade bombs under Rome. Thus was solved the mystery not only of Boadicea's resting place (What mystery? Isn't she buried under Platform 13, King's Cross?) but the fall of Rome. I tell you, they are using these plots up. Next week, a preview promised, Julie Graham as Gillian gets to say: “I've got an Etruscan spear in my hand and I'm not afraid to use it.” But I'll be tuning in to see how much smuttier Bonneville's dialogue is going to get. Last night, Dolly referred to Gillian “frothing around the nether regions”. That is disgusting.

I wonder what the public servants at the BBC who commissioned this nonsense make of Revealed, the entirely serious archaeology documentary series that has been running on Five as a kind of reproach to it. Yesterday it followed a forensic anthropologist and a US army DNA expert to Siberia, where they were trying to determine whether some newly unearthed bones belonged to the two Romanovs whose remains were missing from the family grave, found back in 1991. This was a slightly odd adventure in that it would have been more exciting had these fragments not belonged to Prince Alexei or one of his sisters. But they did and the programme ended with all the Romanovs dead and accounted for, ending, one hopes, the myth of Anastasia's survival for ever. If this had been Bonekickers, Gillian would have discovered her mother was the heir to the Russian throne and so was she and then the evidence would have gone up in flames. I'll take Five's fact over the Beeb's nether-region froth any Tuesday night.

I'm not sure either how much more I can take of Britain's Missing Top Model, in its fourth week turning into the nastiest programme on TV. For this I do not blame the judges - although they seem hideously conflicted about what they are looking for - but the “girls”. Last night the remainder ganged up on Jessica, the odd one out not so much for being a lesbian but for not being obviously disabled. Jessica is deaf in one ear, blind in one eye, has ME and a disorder that makes her bones brittle.

In one unpleasant scene, her rivals found her asleep and about to miss her shoot. They debated feebly about whether to wake her and decided they wouldn't. Later, over dinner, Jessica unwisely returned to her theme that she did not want to be eliminated for “not having a good enough disability”. Sophie, the pretty blonde in the wheelchair, turned on her with mock concern: “Your disability is very important to you, Jess. It is almost as if it defines you.” There is something very wrong about this programme.

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