Bad boys Inc

Swearing, drinking, stealing, mudslinging, fine backsides; Dermot Bolger came face to face with some real men on television this week

The well-bred rich are not like us and never will be. It's not so much a case that we say "toe-may-toe" and they say "toe-ma-toe", as that we say "fucked" and they say "f**ked". Try it some time. To show your breeding, the important thing to remember is to stress the accent on the second asterisk. In Britain there is no greater exponent of the use of the word "f**k" than 51 year old Francis Fulford, who may be broke in financial terms but remains unbowed and undaunted in terms of xenophobia and a mistrust of "the new ruling class". (These consisting of "the intelligentsia and the middle classes who want to put the working class in little boxes miles away from their home.")

This presumably is in contract to the good old days when no self-respecting aristocrat would construct a sweeping vista from his lawn that did not include a close-up view of the beautifully maintained slum dwellings of his underlyings. A semi-beautiful vista was all that this down-at-heel aristocrat had left when Channel 4 viewers encountered him during the summer in the Cutting Edge documentary, The F**king Fulfords, which tried to be like an upper-class version of the Osbornes as we gained a fly-on-the-wall insight in life amid the foul-mouthed Fulford clan in their crumbling country pile. It did nothing for sales of Country Life, but did archive the miracle of making the tediously stupid Osbornes seem like a nice family in comparison.

Francis Fulford hasn't gone away, you know, and Sky One has unleashed this scorned toff in a Landrover to cast a cold eye over Britain in the suitably understated Why Britain's F**ked (Sky One, Thursday, 10.50pm), where, demonstrating every stereotypical cliché, Fulford glowers and curses his way around modern Britain.

Occasionally his targets are good, like when he plunges through pages of New Age therapists who claim things like the root of back ache is not bad posture but being knifed in the back in a previous existence, which can be cured by regressive hypnosis. He does make an interesting point though – if we have all had previous lives, and yet there are more people living on the planet today than were previously born, somebody somewhere must be manufacturing a few counterfeit souls on the side.

His main task, however, is to find a few easy targets and abuse them. This coming Thursday in Why America Sucks (Sky One, 10.50pm), he crosses the Atlantic to discover a race of people who are "ugly, arrogant and aggressive." For a toff with limited finances, this seems rather wasteful when he could have simply looked in the mirror.

One suspects that Fulford was not among the grieving masses lining the route of George Best's funeral in Belfast (RTÉ1, BBC1 and UTV, Saturday 10.30am), which was billed in advance as the biggest funeral in Northern Ireland's history. Like Best's own career, it never quite lived up to its potential, but surely the best tribute was paid by the FAI, who decided to recreate the appalling 1960s surfaces he played on by staging the FAI Cup Final (RTÉ 2, 3pm Sunday) on a hacked up Lansdowne Road.

It was presumably a fluke of programming that RTÉ 2 held their Bad Boys Night on the same day as Ireland's most famous alcoholic was buried. Bad Boys Night: Rogues Gallery (11pm, Saturday) was amusing with profiles of Shane MacGowan and Ben Dunne (MacGowan was the one with the bad teeth). But when you saw that the rest of the evening's line up included Brian McFadden: When a Good Boy Goes Bad and Conrad Gallagher: A Flash in the Pan, you had to confess that they don't make bad boys as interesting as they used to be.

The problem with any bad boy's night is that too much excitement can be a danger for wearers of pacemakers. Presumably it was programme makers had in mind when creating the wonderfully titled Britain's Best Back Gardens (UTV, Sunday, 2.45pm). Rather like a famous wood-seal paint, this does exactly what it says on the tin by featuring short guided tours around, well, the best back gardens in Britain. "There is no fairer prospect than a fine backside", as one early Victorian travel writer famously noted when the sort of country pile that Francis Fulford was born in had "sides" instead of "gardens". If gardening is the drug of choice of the middle-aged, then expect addiction levels to grow on Sunday afternoons.

The only politician in the world who could appear in public in a rugby jersey and turn it into a triumph was Nelson Mandela at the rugby world cup in South Africa some years ago. Likewise, the only politician with the credibility to turn up on TTV, RTÉ 2's children's programme (Friday, 6.30pm) and turn it into a triumph is David Norris. He is slightly plumper and better dressed, but ten times more radical and dangerous than a dozen Brian McFaddens and all the bad boys in RTÉ's rogues' gallery.