Bars, Booze and Bouncers: Confessions ITV1, 10pm A Tabloid is Born BBC4, 9pm IF the latest show in the worn-out Confessions series provided positive proof of anything, it was that ITV's recently appointed trouble-shooter Michael Grade still has a mighty long way to go if his ailing channel is to attract a mass audience.

Bars, Booze and Bouncers: Confessions
ITV1, 10pm
A Tabloid is Born
BBC4, 9pm

IF the latest show in the worn-out Confessions series provided positive proof of anything, it was that ITV's recently appointed trouble-shooter Michael Grade still has a mighty long way to go if his ailing channel is to attract a mass audience.

Bars, Booze and Bouncers featured some unsympathetic wannabe stand-up comedians, former workers in the night-time economy, spouting lame and predictable reminiscences. So: busy barstaff don't like imperious punters waving fivers, clicking their fingers or whistling to get their attention. Who'dathunkit? Barmaids put things in people's drinks if they don't like them. Never would have guessed. Doormen subject nightclub queues to such withering put-downs as: "Have you covered yourself in glue and run through Oxfam?" Wow, we all thought Oscar Wilde was dead. To keep ITV1 alive, Mr Grade, you'll need better stuff than this - and soon.

A Tabloid is Born was hosted by that pun-tastic, fun-loving former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, who began by reminding us of his own tabloid nous. MacKenzie it was, of course, who gloried in showbiz untruth, hateful ridicule and the deaths of 300 Argentinians through the front-page Sun headlines Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster, Pulpit Poofs Can Stay and Gotcha respectively.

Oddly, there were few instances of MacKenzie's skills as a wordsmith anywhere in his voiceover script for a programme that hymned the birth, in May 1896, of Alfred Harmsworth's Daily Mail. "If the trees had had their way, they would have beaten the forester to death rather than produce this kind of old rubbish" was MacKenzie's best, belittling the Edwardian era's serious newspapers for their long-winded, snooze-inducing dullness in being about bishops and parliament, not the ordinary populace.

Fleet Street's answer to Sid James, good old Derek Jamieson, had the best lines as an interviewee, none of them necessarily true. A cackling Derek scoffed at some apochryphal pre-tabloid journalist, sent to cover a ship's launch, who failed to file a report. Asked why, he replied: "No story there, cock - it sank."

But that was about it, memorable quip-wise, leaving MacKenzie to impose himself on the show physically - wandering to and fro across our screens, hammily waving his arms. Here, there'd be a vague stabbing gesture or a half-hearted bit of finger-pointing; there, a limp strangling motion. It's obvious the old boy's out of shape, no longer having the daily opportunity to wrestle the consciences of Sun journos into line.

What did we learn from MacKenzie? That with the Daily Mail, Alfred Harmsworth - later Viscount Northcliffe - invented the perfect tabloid formula. Snare the punters with competitions and photos of the royal family before scaring and inflaming them with short, punchy articles about scandal, murder and crime.

Of Harmsworth/Northcliffe, we learned various bits of things. At his life's end, had he become a power-crazed, monstrous hypocrite? MacKenzie couldn't bring himself to say, preferring instead to congratulate him for being the first man in Britain to own a Mercedes.

An admiring MacKenzie also told us that Harmsworth possessed two mistresses - you wouldn't have read about them in the Daily Mail, natch - and a cliff-top abode, Elmwood at Broadstairs, Kent, that was equipped, in 1905, with a phone in every room.

Harmsworth was man of principles - one of which, according to MacKenzie, got his gardener's wife killed. His long-running antipathy towards Germany resulted in aggrieved Teuton warlords specifically dispatching two battleships to shell his coastal home in 1916. Sadly, they hit the gardener's cottage.

Alfred Harmsworth's law of tabloid journalism? Explain, clarify, simplify.

A Tabloid is Born merrily forgot the additional law of non-tabloids: analyse and interpret.