TV preview, Diana: In Her Own Words (Channel 4): Glamour and depression

Plus: Princess Diana’s ‘Wicked’ Stepmother (Channel 4, Thursday 9pm), Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (BBC4, Wednesday 10.45pm), My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 (BBC1, Wednesday 9pm), Poldark (BBC1, tomorrow, 9pm), Trust Me (BBC1, Tuesday 9pm)

What is it with Channel 4 and the monarchy? Here we have two of the nation’s best-loved institutions (though not, admittedly, beloved by the same groups of people) seemingly at war. You may be enjoying the current run of The Windsors, for example, which is a silly and very funny parody with more than a subversive edge to it, though absent from the schedules this week; and you might also recall the Channel 4 documentary that featured that embarrassing footage of the then Princess Elizabeth and her little sister Princess Margaret being encouraged by their Uncle David, later Edward VIII, to give the Nazi salute in a home movie. And there’s also the Channel 4 Alternative Queen’s Message on Christmas Day, the first one in 1993 memorably featuring Quentin Crisp. Of course.

Well, there’s no let-up. Later in the week we find the channel opening up a new front on the royal periphery in the evocatively titled Princess Diana’s ‘Wicked’ Stepmother, which is sadly no fairy tale. Tomorrow, however, sees the most vicious phase in the conflict, as Diana: In Her Own Words is, at long last, broadcast. To say it has been well-trailed wouldn’t really be doing justice to the vast shelling of her words we’ve endured across all media channels these past few weeks. Even for those of us quite jaded by the whole Charles and Diana thing, it is still quite something to see her so candidly off-the-record (well, temporarily) about her marriage and life as a one-woman awkward squad in the royal establishment. For all the glamour and excitement that anything Diana-based inevitably is, this is, in the end, highly depressing stuff, even ghoulish, so it’s a bit of a TV low-light as well as a highlight of the week, if you see what I mean.

So far as stuff that actually matters goes, next week does have something to offer. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City tells the story of how one decorated campaigner, Jane Jacobs, managed to save at least a fraction of old New York from the ideologues of town planning in the 1960s. It remains curious as to how these zealots were able to push through so much of their modernist agenda angst all common sense and human understanding, with America leading the way but, as so many of our own denuded towns and cities found to their cost, followed with equal determination by the planners and architects of Britain. They were, in their polite, “expert” way, our Western version of the Cultural Revolution going on in China at about the same time. When you think about these sorts of episodes maybe Michael Gove – “people have had enough of experts” – was right after all.

My Family, Partition and Me sees Anita Rani revisiting the partition of British India at independence in 1947, and what became of her own family as the new states of India and Pakistan were established after the second world war broke the spell of Western invincibility across east Asia. Partition was the “solution” the British as they hurriedly quit, and it was one that carried a heavy cost in what we now term “ethnic cleansing”.

We’ve all been Poldarked by the BBC’s latest bonnet and bodice romp, and this week the latest adaption of Poldark reaches its climax – can there be any other word? More to some tastes will be new drama Trust Me, with added interest as Jodie “Doctor Who” Whittaker plays, er, a doctor. Think of Trust Me as a more politically conscious version of Casualty and you’d be on the right lines. Anyway there are no Daleks in this one, more’s the pity.