TELEVISION / Deep sadness here in, er, the studio

IT WAS the week in which the POW (Prisoner of Windsor) made her great escape. The Prince and Princess, it seemed, had decided to live in truth, if only because the lies had piled up so high they were threatening to puncture the ozone layer over Kensington. All channels were at action stations for this Deeply Sad Day, extending their news bulletins and sending men in thin clothing to jabber in front of a misty black shape that was alleged to be Buckingham Palace. In a night thick with commiserations, it was just possible for the keen- eared viewer to make out a high, glad noise. The sound of a young woman laughing with relief.

But it wouldn't do for the fairy to be seen to be happy to leave the tale, so bluff and nonsense were the order of the night. On the BBC's Six O'Clock News, Anna Ford asked Clarence Mitchell what the mood was like outside the Palace. 'Well, obviously deep sadness,' said Clarence, raw and jumpy as a PC on his first day in court. It soon became, well, obvious, that the distress was confined to journalists unable to find a single Brit to shed a loyal tear. 'It's all tourists here,' said Clarence forlornly. Back in the studio, the Archbishop of York was looking on the bright side in a memorable departure from Church teaching: 'Separation, in a curious way, affirms the sacredness of marriage,' he said.

Over on ITN, Norman 'Gypsy Rose' Rees was reading royal minds. 'The future King, there, pondering a life with a live-apart Princess,' said Rees, watching Prince Charles meet people in Wales with a broad smile. In Newcastle, the live-apart Princess, slated to be the rule-apart Queen, was exercising her spell on a group of old ladies a-flutter with pride and excitement. She looked peachy and relaxed, but Rees knew different: 'She seemed somehow to draw strength from the crowd, a reminder perhaps of happier times.'

More seriously, some reporters allowed sentiment and a reflex obsequiousness to come between them and the questions that had been raised (or insufficiently obscured) in John Major's Commons statement. The BBC's Court correspondent, Jennie Bond, talked as if the humbug of the Palace press office had lodged in her throat, providing a glottal stop on any loose talk while leaking a soothing syrup to disguise the bad taste. When Anna Ford asked her why the announcement had been made in such a rush (the only recorded instance of parents telling their children they were parting in time for Christmas), Bond interrupted her to say: 'We've just heard that the Queen Mother is going to attend the Princess Royal's wedding, so it's not all bad news.' Calling this 'news' stretched a credulity that was brought to twanging point when Ford broached the subject of third parties. 'The decision has not been taken with a view to giving them freedom to go out with other people,' said Bond. Ford kept a straight face: 'So any relationship with other people is ruled out?' Even Bond had to give a thin, skimmed-milk smile.

The whole country knew what these women had to pretend they did not - that the Princess could not be expected to exchange the desert of her marriage for a lifelong celibacy, that 'separate domestic arrangements' were needed to prevent both parties having to sit in cars and call their various good friends on portable phones, that 'no plans to divorce' is Palace code for 'We'll sneak it through when the country has got used to Stage One'. Television producers may think that the putty hand in the velvet glove is the most respectful way to treat royalty, but what kind of a way is it to treat millions of viewers who have probably gathered that the clock did not stop in 1953? How are we to receive a sentiment such as 'In the loyal heartlands the news was greeted with sadness and silence' (Six O'Clock News) when we know it's not a shame, but the end of a sham? It said much for this hokum that the appearance on ITN of Mirror royal reporter James Whitaker - one part Max Bygraves to three parts python - could raise the spirits. Over a film of the Princess ducking a kiss from her husband, Whitaker hissed: 'That was the day she told the world she hated him]'

In a day of institutional crisis, television was behaving like a sister institution. As usual, it was left to Newsnight (BBC2) to sound the note of disestablishment and separate the gritty from the nitty. James Cox wondered whether the cosy consensus didn't smack of news management, of 'party politics set aside to stifle debate about the role of the monarchy in modern Britain'. After the lullaby that had been crooned at us all day, this snapped the brain to attention. In the studio, Jeremy Paxman held the towel while the editor of the Sunday Times took on his counterpart from the Sunday Telegraph.

Charles Moore was still frowning in the Olde Englande corner when the Incredulous Hulk came over and started to thrash him. Andrew Neil pinned his opponent down until he confessed that he believed in 'the importance in these matters of concealment and, if you like, hypocrisy'. Neil won on contemporary points, but in his own reactionary way Moore had struck a blow: this crisis had been brought about by putting private happiness above public duty. Fifty-six years on from Edward VIII, another royal had abdicated, this time from responsibility. Unlike then, it seemed the natural thing to do. On News at Ten, Andrew Morton spelt it out, when Trevor McDonald asked if the Princess would be feeling sad. 'The Princess of Wales,' Morton said, 'has everything she could possibly want.'

The separation was put into perspective by Prisoners of Conscience (BBC2) which nightly told stories of precise horror. A man who had himself come blinking back to life spoke on behalf of Manuel, a Mexican Indian jailed for 24 years for murdering a man he had never met, after being tortured into signing a confession he could not read. John McCarthy described the torture as one might give details of house contents to an insurance man. You ticked the electric shocks off on the atrocities checklist; it was the ingenuity that appalled, the very notion of having ideas to put in the cruelty suggestion box - the 'fizzy water mixed with strong spices that they forced into his nose'. McCarthy only seemed to come close to his own bone once when he slowed to give due weight to the forty-six days of Manuel's hunger strike. There was a risk that the fascination of McCarthy might distract but, once you had taken in the fuller face, the spruce jacket and tie, he did just the opposite. As if, his own mettle having been tested, he could short-circuit the mental journey we all have to make to reach another's suffering. The appeal lasted five minutes: it felt like your imagination had been flossed with barbed wire.

The last This Week (ITV) went down fighting, as it had begun 36 years ago. It looked at the 600 homeless people who have died in the past year, most unnecessarily. Like the man who was so cold that when a hostel worker bathed his feet, she found two toes in a sock. A rich male voice read from Ecclesiasticus as the camera prowled a pauper's funeral: 'And some there be, which have no memorial: who are perished as though they have never been.' The irony cannot have been lost on editor Paul Woolwich and his excellent team, whose work is now consigned to the leaky vault of televisual memory.

Carlton, which takes over from Thames in January after winning the franchise in the Government's lottery fiasco (Open the box] Take the money]), has already announced one of the shows we will be seeing instead of This Week - The Good Sex Guide. An outraged examination of naked injustice supplanted by an examination of outrageous nakedness. A very British cock-up.