You don't have to be famous to know that fame is a terrible burden for those on whom it falls. You have only to read the reams of celebrity journalism to get a glimpse of the daily trial of intrusion, impertinence, intolerance and insolence that is the lot of the famous. They complain that they can't live a normal life, which is precisely why people who are drowning in normal lives are queuing up to be celebrities manqués. The anguish of celebrities is part of the pleasure of keeping them: if they were hamsters, the RSPCA would have us all up for cruelty.
The Greek tragedy of destiny, hubris and nemesis is the familiar fairy-tale plot of fame. You come from nothing, you are precipitously built up, then pushed over the edge, where the fall is as fascinating as the ascent. There is now an added third act to this perennial parable: resurrection and renaissance. So Barrymore makes his triumphant, cringing way back to the small screen; Anne Diamond has her stomach stapled for your edification. Having been born again to ritual humiliation, the celebrities are accepted back into the fold of fame. The humiliation is the important part, a shriving from which the famous emerge tearfully grateful and acquiescent, having learnt their lesson. Teaching celebrities a lesson is the new fame game for television, and presumably for its audience.
The latest rebooted celebrity is Anthea Turner. No inconsequential demi-celeb was ever given such a vicious gang-kicking as Anthea. In fact, she became more famous for the buckets of pantomime loathing flung over her than for whatever it was that she did in the first place - which, come to think of it, I can't think of. If anyone should have breathed a long sigh of relief and gratefully slipped beneath the waves of normality, it should have been Anthea, but obviously not. Like a battered wife, she's returned to her abusers, and the BBC is only too happy to oblige.
Turner has been given a home-improvements programme, Anthea Turner - Perfect Housewife (Thursday, BBC3), the Surrey version of Kim and Aggie; in place of filth, there's mess. Anthea welcomes two slovenly housewives into her gracious home to teach them how to fold towels and marinate cocktail sausages. Why she agreed to this is beyond the wit or knowing of mere mortals, but as a consequence we get to nose around her lovely home, which is just as ridiculously anal, aesthetically barren and visibly sociably strained as we remember from OK!. Anthea herself fits in nicely, appearing slightly too thin for her face and age, dressed in that ultra-relaxed way that just screams hours spent in out-of-town shopping centres, sessions with colour-me-beautiful co-ordinators and strung-out mornings shouting at the walk-in wardrobe.
Anthea's bleached desire to be proud of her own cupboards was plainly a projection of the pride that might once have been directed at something with meaning, like a career. Her messianic, slightly scary instructions for eradicating awkward, embarrassing stickiness sounded like domestic eugenics. You began to wonder where her husband and friends were - possibly folded up in one of the many wicker baskets, vacuum-packed in storage bags.
The pleasure of this programme was all in the sniggering, then openly laughing, at the appalling unearned snobbery of the shag-headed Hyacinth Bucket, taking herself and housework with a terrifying seriousness. All this in the week that Betty Friedan died. Anthea is, without an iota of irony or self-knowledge, a properly real, in-your-face desperate housewife. And here I am, giving this poor damaged celebrity yet another critical mugging, as if she hadn't suffered enough. But, shamefully, I can't help it. Some people have "Spank me and stick chewing gum in my hair" written all over their careers.
There is an assumption that broadcasting is broadly left-wing by sympathy and inclination. It's a pretty fair assumption. The left is naturally iconoclastic, the right iconophilic. The right conserves, the left creates. So, television is made mostly by left-wing people and, because of this, documentaries tend to look at right-wing subjects. We've all grown up with righteous inquiries into Third World dictators, criminal multi-nationals and duplicitous Americans. So, Lefties (Wednesday, BBC4) is a welcome, not to say inspired, idea for an investigation.
It turned out to be rather a conservative, nostalgic look back at whatever happened to the likely lads of the hard left. In the first episode, we were shown a street of squatters in Brixton and the dialectic struggle between radical primal-screaming feminists, vagina investigators and the blokes at the Workers Revolutionary Party. It was all strangely touching and dotty, in a melancholy sort of way; a reverie for a lost innocence of vanished utopias. What was surprising was how eccentric it all seems in retrospect: how could so much ire, fear and serious concern have been devoted to these hopeless, petulant idealists by the Establishment and the press? Nothing dates like the pressing political crisis of yesterday. The 1970s seem so sweetly innocent compared with today's news.
Altogether, Lefties is softly pink, remarkably uncritical and fondly reminiscent. But then it would be. The hard left morphed into the greens and world-trade activists; the fact they had supported and aided a lot of the most vicious, inhuman and murderous dictators, revolutionaries and guerrillas simply because they were anti-capitalists is lost in the mist of nostalgia.
Hand in hand with Lefties - or perhaps that should be hand in ear - came the history of English folk music, Folk Britannia (Friday, BBC4). No sound has been so roundly, incomprehensibly ridiculed as our home-grown folk music. But then, also, little has been taken so seriously. This marvellous documentary series began by showing the monumental egos and eccentric talents that were involved in the modern folk revival. There were two competing curators of folk: on one side, the BBC, Cecil Sharp House and the compilers of polite rural hey-noni-noni-no, such as Benjamin Britten and William Walton; on the other, the urban political protesters, led by Ewan MacColl, aka Jimmy Miller, the autocratic arbiter of agitprop folk (and father of Kirsty). Ridiculous though he was, and autocratic as his self-imposed regulations of folk orthodoxy were, MacColl still wrote a pair of the most splendid songs, Dirty Old Town and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. And he compiled a series of radio documentaries, such as Singing the Fishing, that were brilliantly transferred to TV by Philip Donnellan.
Still, this series shows what an incredibly rich and diverse history of popular music there is in Britain, and that it's really only been appreciated by a nonpartisan audience when performers have taken it away to do something unfolksy with it, as Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds, the Pogues and Billy Bragg have done. Folk is the one place you can go if you want a song that says more than "I want to shag you ".