Katie Price Exclusive: With Piers Morgan

Saturday, ITV1

With a credibility gap yawning wider than the Cheddar Gorge, there was a reputation to restore on Saturday night's Katie Price Exclusive. The former topless model also had some work to do to. When the disgraced Mirror editor turned talent assessor interviewed Price in March for his new series Life Stories, Piers Morgan declared that he wanted it to be “the best interview Katie Price has ever done”. Confronting reports that her marriage to the Cypriot- Australian crooner Pete Andre was headed for the cuttings library of history, he asked if she was happy. “Absolutely, yes. Couldn't be happier,” she replied. Did she think she and Pete would be together for ever? “Yes - especially the amount of kids we are planning in our future.”

The reference is poignant now, since on Saturday's remedial encounter with the now divorcing Price, she explained that it was in March that she had discovered she was pregnant with a child she would lose in May. But if an interview is to be judged on how close it gets to the truth, then Morgan's original, far from being the best ever, failed spectacularly. Unsurpassably happy? No, they were in marriage counselling. He was battling the green-eyed monster over his wife's enthusiasm for her dressage trainer Andrew Gould. A solemn and binding agreement was being hammered out by which neither would go out in the evening without the other. This homage to the so-called Paul and Linda Protocol - whereby the McCartneys never spent a night apart unless one of them was in jail - was breached when, with the inevitability of a Sun front page, Price went nightclubbing with none other than Gould, the innocent Cassio in this sad tale. Andre saw the headline, “Boozy Kate flashes on a wild night out without Pete”, and took the opportunity to kibosh the fairytale's happy ending.

Anyone who saw their ITV 2 reality show, Katie and Pete: the Next Chapter Stateside, would not have been as easily gulled as Morgan. Price behaved horribly to her sentimental and less intelligent consort, withdrawing not merely love but sex. The one virus deadly to a relationship - contempt - had taken grip. Morgan's new interview scuppered even this show's credibility too, however. We thought it had got close and personal: Katie's yeast infection, Pete's inflamed anus. Now it turned out that Price's constant visits to the loo before the London Marathon were not so much thwarted attempts to “poor” (she speaks like a toddler), but taken to check how badly she was bleeding after the termination of her pregnancy.

What else did Morgan do with his second chance? The main triumph was to establish beyond doubt that this “genuine girl”, although in many respects brave, swims in a very shallow rill of sincerity. When Andre dumped her, she released a statement that she would always love “her Pete”. Now she could not distinguish love from habit. But over the miscarriage, there was no doubting her anguish. Her eyes welled so fully that she feared her eyelashes might fall off. He ticked her off for her subsequent binge in Ibiza. She flashed him with her bra, thus proving that the dichotomy between slapper Jordan and the domestic goddess KP is another fiction. Plus, Morgan got the miscarriage exclusive. He is a very good interviewer. Imagine what he would get out of someone who knew what genuine meant.

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution

Saturday, BBC Two

More scary even than Price's assertion that she could be remarried in a year - “I'm on the market. Bring it on, boys!” - was Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution. This documentary reminded us that the state that took the lives of 55,000 of its citizens was run by intellectuals. It also reminded us, courtesy of a truly alarming talking head called Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defence of Lost Causes, that certain big brains still have the hots for this sort of thing. Zizek said, for instance, that there was a “deep truth” to Robespierre's contention that anyone who showed fear must be guilty. The more he was quoted back to Simon Schama, the more exasperated the author of Citizens became. They should have been left in a studio to get on with it. Instead the debate was interrupted by rather unconvincing re-enactments of the wonderfully named Committee of Public Safety.

Liz Smith's Summer Cruise

Sunday, BBC Four

Last night's Daisy Asquith documentary Liz Smith's Summer Cruise followed the 87-year-old former Royle Family star (pictured below) on a voyage from Croatia to Venice. Mercifully, it was not a travelogue but a character study. Brought up by her grandparents, deserted by her husband 52 years ago, Smith is a woman whom everyone likes yet who lacks the talent for intimacy. Other travellers tried to befriend her; she felt they loved Nana Royle not her. As if it had not fully progressed from her lonesome childhood, her mind instead span spooky fantasies about the ship. This surprising snapshot of loneliness was in its quiet way rather more revealing than what Katie Price chose to flash at Piers Morgan.

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