Kingdom ITV1, 9.15pm Celebrity Wife Swap Channel 4, 8pm BARELY three weeks into its second series, Kingdom has gone terribly awry. It's slipped its pleasant former moorings in quirky-yet-idyllic Market Shipborough, drifting aimlessly away to a new berth in Tellyland that's far cosier and altogether less credible (Much Codswallop perhaps, or Nether Woolly Piffle).

It's all down to the return of Peter Kingdom's hitherto-mysterious self-disappearing brother Simon, I reckon. Now that Simon's back, revealing himself merely to be a one-dimensional feckless rogue, most of Kingdom's dramatic tension has evaporated.

What are we left with? As the sage and saintly Peter, Stephen Fry no longer has any great detective-style fraternal conundrum to unravel, or agonise over. So instead he moons about listlessly, doing light legal do-goodery while casually re-uniting a pair of star-crossed lovers with a few platitudes about the painful nature of amour.

The star-crossed lovers were both complete prannocks, incidentally. He was a swaggering stereotype USAF pilot from a nearby airbase who rode a Harley and snarled cliches like: "Take a hike, big guy!" She was a plummy-voiced English-rose-scented lady of the manor. She became pregnant by him. He then vanished. She hired Peter to find him - only for Peter to find that neither of them was what they seemed. They'd each deceived the other. Ergo, they were ideally suited. And very hard to care about.

Elsewhere, the eccentric Sidney Snell defeated the military might of George Bush's Amerikkka just by standing outside yon USAF base complaining about its noisy low-flying jets by holding aloft a placard that said "Arse". This was after Peter had helped Sidney defend the liberal/left-wing tradition of Olde Englande against modern-day American colonialism by appearing at the airbase declaring: "You're not in a jet plane now, you're on land my land!"

As ever, Peter's lovable young sidekick, Lyle, played his part: principled dupe. Lyle was comically attacked by bees. He nobly rejected the love of a compromised-yet-decent woman. Lyle was also saucily led on and then dumped by a naughty biker girl in a figure-hugging leather suit. Then he succeeded in re-routing USAF's noisy low-flying jets away from protesters such as Sidney Snell.

Wouldn't you just know it, though: Lyle only succeeded in re-directing the jets along a flight-path that noisily takes them straight over Market Shipborough's one pub. The establishment's barman favoured Lyle with the kind of unfunny comedy glare that went out of vogue in British monochrome films half a century ago.

To cap it all, Lyle had helped devious fraudster Simon secure bail by timeously discovering a big bag of cash that he'd left under brother Peter's desk (100% clean, the cash was, of course). Have you now worked out exactly where Kingdom can be found? It's in Utter Tripemould-under-St-Bogus.

Equally predictably, there was never going to be much amity between lesbian one-time Page 3 girl Samantha Fox and much-married old school comedy turn Freddie Starr in Celebrity Wife Swap. Sent to stay with Sam's partner, Myra, Freddie's longsuffering current wife, Donna, lacked her daily round of constant chores - tea-making, child-rearing, cooking. Given literally nothing to do, Donna did nothing of note.

With Sam as his stand-in wife, Freddie continued to do nothing other than watch the telly, smoke, drink tea, ruminate on the comic possibilities of "dwarf porn," rest and eat. However, he did helpfully sum Sam up for his two young stepchildren. "She used to be a Page 3 girl, showing her boobs off," he told them with forthright gracelessness. "Takes a lot of talent to do that."

Surly Freddie's talent lay in idleness and poorly expressed irritation. It's his wife you feel sorry for.