Last night's TV: Paul O'Grady's Favourite Fairy Tales (ITV); Last Tango in Halifax (BBC1)

The gruesome truth about Snow White and her dwarves

Fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood had some gruesome origins, as this programme discovered (ITV)

I much enjoyed Paul O’Grady’s Favourite Fairy Tales, in which our favourite drag artiste travelled round the chocolate-box schlosses of Germany to find out the truly grim origins of the Grimm tales.

You see, about 200 years ago, the Brothers Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm) performed much the same function as the giant Disney corporation does now – taking traditional and ancient folk tales, cleaning them up a bit and adding illustrations to text, thus refashioning them into children’s entertainment. Indeed, much of the Disney machine’s wealth stems form their own versioning of these stories, which have varying degrees of grounding in reality.

O’Grady, famous as he is, is still an underestimated broadcaster confined to the fluffier end of the market; this incursion into horror will, I hope, help him evolve his repertoire. He looked perfectly happy splattered in blood and engaged in cannibalism. Good to see.

All this was fascinating, and made we wonder what would happen if someone actually took these “adult” origins of these familiar tales – so often turned into Christmas panto and so often starring our own Paul – and made them into what would basically be snuff movies, Rapunzel meets Saw if you like. So the “kiss” of the Prince Charming in Sleeping Beauty is something of a euphemism for a vile act of necrophilia; Little Red Riding Hood is in fact the victim of a predatory paedophile, and suffers a violent murderous death, and Cinderella’s ugly sisters end up blind and hobbling, their toes cut off by their greedy stepmum. Why, by the way, step-parenting always gets a bad press is beyond me.

Cinderella it was who was closest to a documented historical personality – a German countess called margarita who was in love with the mighty King Philip II of Spain, he of Armada fame. The marriage between the two young lovers was blocked and, like Snow White, Margarita reputedly fell victim to a poisoning. She was astonishingly beautiful, the fairest of them all, and this was the undoing of margarita and the fictional Snow White. The dwarves, by the way, were child labourers made to go down the local copper mine at age eight, which, in turn stunted their growth so that by the time they were in their twenties, and suitably bearded, they did indeed resemble Uncle Walt's Doc, Happy, Grumpy etc.

So these fairy tales, in their original form, make for exquisitely painful entertainment, and their own story was told with wit and affection by drag queen O’Grady, who started his odyssey around the fairy tale trail of western Germany on a bed with many mattresses in the middle of some woodland (and presumably with a pea at the bottom of it all) with the voiceover “once upon a time an evil queen woke in an enchanted forest...” So he did, and discovered some very unhappy endings.

The festive edition of ‘Last Tango in Halifax’ left this reviewer cold (BBC)

Sorry to say, but the excellent acting, decent scripts and atmospheric cinematography in Last Tango in Halifax have never added up to something engaging for me, which I find odd. It’s popular enough too, with near-national treasures Derek Jacobi, Nicola Walker, Anne Reid and Sarah Lancashire at their very best in it, but I just cannot engage with any of the characters, either the ones you’re supposed to empathise with or the others. So the usual incentive for the dramatic suspension of disbelief disappears, and the ghost story in the barn bits of the last night’s concluding episode of their Christmas editions just left me as a cold as, well, a night out in December in Halifax. Happy Christmas.