Satisfying both nature and glory

Swingers in Ancient Rome; sexless singers in the 1980s; semis in Dundalk; songs from the soul and celebs in their element were all in a week of TV for Dermot Bolger

A small incestuous town where everyone knows everyone and who everyone is sleeping with, where intrigue instinctively runs in the blood, stimulants are not hard to come by and debauchery is general after dark. It sounds remarkably like Eugene O'Brien's midland's Irish town in Pure Mule, which walked away with five awards at the Irish Film and Television Awards (RTÉ 1, 9.35pm Saturday). However, as if to prove that there have been other distant civilisations with the licentiousness of Offaly, the BBC has unleashed Rome (BBC1, Sundays 11.15pm and BBC 2, Wednesdays, 9pm) upon the unsuspecting masses.

Roman history has had a vital hold on the upper class English imagination for well over a century, both as a cradle of progressive ideas like senates, straight-roads and hot baths, and also as a source of straight-faced, high-minded titillation. Over the twentieth century, the concept of ancient Rome evolved as a sort of Windmill theatre where the actresses speak Latin. Naturally in this day and age, television does not need such trappings of high-minded classicalism to have actors disrobe. But – mindful of the general public's limited attention span – the BBC has not been slow in pushing Rome as a historical epic where Romans would reveal their dark sides and their backsides. So much so that director Michael Apted has been furious with the Corporation's editing back of the opening three episodes into two, with the BBC's focus being on sex and violence and much of the historical plot of intrigue and rivalry between Caesar and Pompey cut away on the grounds that the general British public already knows their history.

Anyone who has stood on an English street at closing time could have told Mr Apted that, in between bouts of vomiting, the youth of that nation rarely discuss anything else except Roman history. Still, even if short on history and long on copulation, Rome is energetic and at times frantic television, which may send the studious scurrying back to their history books and the health-faddish off to be doused in bull's blood. Alternative medicine may never be the same again.

In terms of shameless depravity however, the ancient Romans were beaten into second place by that other vanished tribe from ancient history, the New Romantics, who cross-dressed their way through the early 1980s, with the men having the sort of big hairstyles that Bill Clinton liked to receive oral testimonies from. Their heyday of debauchery lasted until the week in which Britain wrestled back the sheep-strewn acres of the Falkland Islands. During that same week, a dancer collapsed at a gay nightclub in London, was hospitalised and became the first Briton to die from which was then called Gay Related Immune Deficiency.

The New Romantic era was explored in Girls and Boys: Sex and British Pop (BBC2, Sunday 9pm) a series built around the not very original premise that pop music is driven by the public's fascination with sex and gender. Most New Romantics have spread out into middle-age but are still instantly recognisable – they are the middle-aged men desperate to buy the negatives of photos of them with their clothes on. Roman history may not be the most original topic in the world, but at least a highly respectable period has elapsed since I Claudius. The New Romantics and their confused sexuality seems to be on television every month, and no matter how many unusual hats Boy George wears in each interview, his novelty does wear off. For those of you wanting to know what distinguishes Girls and Boys: Sex and British Pop from all the other interminable programmes on British popular culture – it's the one that's on BBC 2 on Sundays.

Sex is not the hook for House Hunters Revisited (RTÉ 1, Sundays 7pm), but I think it might need more than a few Roman orgies, floggings and crucifixions to make it gripping viewing. I may be biased because I am the most unsuccessful house hunter in the history of our state, but I wasn't really quite sure who would be glued to the story of a nice and normal family deciding to sell one house in Dundalk and buy not one but two houses in Limerick.

Like another vice, it has been noted about house-hunting that its chief virtues are that its cheap and that you don't have to dress up for it. However, while I wished the family luck in their move (and as this was the first series revisited, they had already moved), it did leave this viewer "unmoved", as they say in the trade.

What did move me was Sé Mo Laoch (TG4, Sunday 5.40pm) a profile of the late and great singer and song collector Frank Harte, who deserves to be remembered in the same breath as Seamus Ennis, Joe Heaney, Nioclás Tóibín and a handful of others who preserved Irish song, kept it close to their hearts and made it breathe again.