I have long been fascinated by the way television matches presenters with programmes. No I haven't, but if I were a television presenter that's the sort of thing I would say. They are all fascinated by everything. Last week on Stephen Fry in America, Mr Erudition announced that he had been fascinated by America ever since he discovered he had “almost” been born there. Fry's was an enthusiastic account of the country and it was bolstered by an interview in the Radio Times in which he “hit out” at Brits who view Americans as “ignorant, irony free and vulgar”. His bluster amused one of my correspondents who remembered Fry on Parkinson lamenting that a feral bear in Peru had been named locally not “Paddington” but “Yogi”. “Which just shows you,” he said to his fellow guest, Robin Williams, “how far the cancer of your wretched culture has spread.”

Joanna Lumley had slightly better credentials for presenting Ian Fleming: Where Bond Began. She had, she said, been fascinated by “this man who created this most mesmeric hero” ever since she had appeared as a minor Bond girl in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Lumley is fascinated by many things - it was the Arctic the other week on Joanna Lumley in the Land of the Northern Lights - but I was surprised by this one. In 1978 I interviewed her for my university magazine and distinctly remember her saying how keen she had been that Purdy in The New Avengers would not be “the screwable fluff that is a Bond girl”.

Now here was Lumley telling us that the “enduring sheen of Bondism still sticks to me now”. To be fair to Lumley, she did gush this semi-ironically in front of Samantha Weinberg whose Moneypenny Diaries novels seem to be some kind of female response to Bond and she did remind us of Fleming's notorious line in The Spy Who Loved Me, a novel told from a female perspective, that “all women love semi-rape”.

It was Weinberg's view that Fleming's sadomasochistic fantasies could probably be blamed on his domineering mother. I began to feel quite sorry for Fleming, who later fell in love with another strong woman who dismissed his thrillers as “mere pornography”. His stepdaughter remembered the two arguing “like billio” and her mother, driving off in a huff and putting a “big kiss” on his beloved Thunderbird. Ann Fleming could have out-philandered Bond. Her most notorious affair, not mentioned in the documentary, was with the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell.

Where Bond began, it was this programme's thesis, was precisely where Fleming, the wartime intelligence officer and foreign correspondent, ended. The documentary drew convincing links between the books and the highs of his playboy life. Even more impressively, it found that his downs had worked their way in too. His first love, Muriel Wright, was killed in an air raid in 1944 and Fleming was called from the card table to identify her body. The death of Tracy Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service could have been an account of that awful moment. Later, dying from heart disease, Fleming wrote his depression into Thunderball. Bond had begun to think that “all life was nothing more than a heap of 6-4 against”. Louise Hooper's programme was as impeccable as one of James Bond's suits. Lumley looked every inch the Bond girl.

Since Quantum of Solace is on its way (Lumley “stumbled across” the very words, scribbled in one of Fleming's notebooks) we males get a temporary licence to be sexist, so I'll add that Kate Williams could be a Bond girl too. She was the presenter of Saturday's excellent Timewatch on the young Queen Victoria. It is to Williams's credit that before long the extraordinary story she told - of the teenager's battle to extricate herself from her scheming mother, an “unscrupulous little Irish person” named John Conroy and her wicked uncle, the Duke of Cumberland - diverted my attention from her preRaphaelite hair, scarlet lipstick and gold- painted eyelids. The only person more exotic on the show was the ear-studded Sir Roy Strong, to whom complaints about the phrase “unscrupulous little Irish person” should be forwarded.

There is nothing exotic about A Touch of Frost, a detective show that would have horrified Ian Fleming with its determination to show life at its glummest and naffest. I watched the first episode in 1992 hoping it would be the new Morse, realised it wasn't and never watched again.

Last night, then, was quite a shock. It is truly terrible: leadenly paced, datedly filmed, implausibly plotted and lazily acted. I swear David Jason forgot his lines midway through a speech. Mind you, the dialogue is nothing if not forgettable. Sidekick George to colleague needing a pool car: “You'll be lucky to get a bicycle with this year's budget.” Frost: “If it did, it wouldn't have any wheels.” Next to A Touch of Frost, Midsomer Murders is Shakespeare and John Nettles Olivier.

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