Most sincerely, Dan Cruickshank

Last night's TV reviewed: Most Sincerely: Hughie Green; Dan Cruickshank's Adventures in Architecture

Hughie Green, brought back to hideous life by Trevor Eve on BBC Four’s Most Sincerely: Hughie Green, was a celebrity universally unloved. A majority of the millions who watched him on the game show Double Your Money and the talent contest Opportunity Knocks probably actively hated him. Not even children were fooled by his insincerity, to which he drew unwise attention with his catchphrase “I mean that most sincerely” (it is a myth that he never said it: he did). My mother called him “nauseating” reveals Andrew Billen, and it was for many years the longest word I knew. When I hear it to this day it is Hughie’s grey face with its dead eyes and mirthless, lopsided grin that leaps to the mind’s eye, like a ghoul at the bathroom window.

Yet in private he was a saintly man. No, of course he wasn’t, although maybe, just for light and shade, the writer Tony Basgallop could have found something nice to say about Hughie, beyond identifying him as the father of reality television. It was Green’s vision that the contestants on his shows should look to be real people and so should the hostesses (remember Monica Rose, anyone?). His less talented sometime producer Jess Yates (a decrepit Mark Benton) preferred birds in such roles and on The Sky’s the Limit, Double Your Money’s successor, apparently came up with the idea of dressing them all in pink wigs. That way he could screw them, fire them and replace them without the viewers noticing.

They noticed when Jess, known as the Bishop on account of his bald pate, unctuousness and proximity to a (church) organ on Stars on Sunday, got the full tabloid exposé treatment. That was the end of him. Hughie never laid a hand on a contestant; he was too busy juggling mistresses, one of them Jess’s wife, a former Miss Blackpool, whom he impregnated. The result was Paula Yates, the one woman Hughie could never have and whose absence from his life, in this account, obsessed him. The grisly truth emerged after Hughie’s lonely funeral, his secret having been safely delivered to a News of the World reporter by the great man in his only gift to his child. It was no stretch to suggest, as Most Sincerely did, that the revelation deepened the terminal depression into which Paula fell.

“They loved you Hughie,” said the man from the Screws in a drinking session long into Green’s resentful retirement. “I don’t believe they did,” he replied, wondering whether if he had been as open about his love life as Paula had been, “they” would have loved him more. Most Sincerely opened that can of vipers and, sure enough, we loved him even less.

Trevor Eve, who ever since A Sense of Guilt has been best when personifying sleaze, made a splendid Hughie. Although there was no real physical resemblance, at times his face became Green’s by the sheer conviction of acting. It was a merciless portrayal. Hughie was shown being nice exactly once, when comforting a nervous boy about to perform on Knocks and that was because the kid reminded him of a nervous, juvenile Hughie Green. But, like Richard III, Green was such a fascinating monster that you hardly missed the lack of a convincing psychological explanation. The film went on too long, but then, so, frankly, did Hughie.

Over on BBC Two Dan Cruickshank is in the Arctic Circle, building an igloo. Well, Andreas Sanimuinaq, the igloo specialist, is doing all the work; Dan is just standing around, gasping and saying "golly".

Because of global warming, the igloo could soon be a structure that's lost for ever. Actually, no one really uses them any more and I suppose you could argue that, in the grand scheme of things, there will be more serious consequences of climate change than melting igloos: the end of polar bears, the Netherlands, the human race - that kind of thing. But Dan wants to make his snow home - or, rather, watch Sanimuinaq do it. So he's jolly well going to. This is Dan Cruickshank's Adventures in Architecture, after all.

Sanimuinaq lays down his carefully carved snow-blocks, spiralling up clockwise to follow the sun. And it is amazing to watch - the creation of a beautiful little dome, one of the marvels of engineering, especially when it's built out of snow. It's a bit wonky to be honest, and more pointy than the neat little ones you see in story books, but I'm blaming Sanimuinaq's helper for that. Dan's so excited sometimes I think his mind wanders from the job. But his bouncy, Famous Five-ish enthusiasm is very contagious, even here in the frozen wastes of Greenland.

When Dan's dome is done, there's the small question of what to do with it - a problem Peter Mandelson once faced. But here there are no tourists to visit it and get bored and confused. Dan lies alone inside, marvelling at the roof, gasping in wonder, inserting exclamation marks all over the place. Ah, a visitor. Age Hammeden (brilliant names they have around here), a hunter, is returning to his village. Oooh, what's he got? A nice seal perhaps, for Sunday lunch? Dan wants to see. "Polar bear," says Hammeden, casually.

"Polar bear - really?" says Dan, trying, not very successfully, to disguise his surprise and dismay. It's a bit like asking someone what they're looking at on the internet, and being told, calm as you like, "hardcore pornography". Except, of course, hardcore pornography isn't part of anyone's culture. Whereas Sunday polar bear with all the trimmings totally is, for these guys. And it's important to respect that, Dan knows. "Are there many polar bears around here?" he asks politely. Not now there aren't, that was the last one, and Hammeden got it, right between the eyes. Here it is, all tied up and squashed into a frozen block. Look, that's his nose.

Anyway, no time to dilly-dally and get sentimental; this is an architecture show, about how buildings have shaped our ambitions and defined the way we live. So Dan bounds off to China, to Leshan in Szechuan province, site of the world's largest stone Buddha. "I'm agog to see it!" he splutters. He's agog quite a lot of the time. It is huge, a giant figure carved out of the cliff overlooking the river. "Golly, he's absolutely enormous!" says Dan. Standing by Buddha's massive toes, it looks as if he's taken a healthy swig from a bottle marked: "Drink me." The world of architecture is Wonderland for Dan, and these are his adventures. To be honest, I'm not quite clear what links all these places, apart from our guide's enthusiasm for them, his general agogness and his own little fantasies, but that's good enough for me.

Back to the cold, then, to a baroque palace in St Petersburg, a blue-and-white wedding cake rising out of the snow. It is, says Dan, a shockingly personal portrait of the woman who built it - Empress Elizabeth the First - and her hedonistic world. "Those most in favour with the empress," he says, breathily, as he goes inside, "would penetrate deepest!"

Then things come to a climax, almost literally for Dan, at a Hindu temple in India, a monument to the power of sex that has been called the most obscene building in the world. Hardcore pornography was the norm round there in the 13th century and the whole thing is covered in carvings of people doing extremely rude things to each other. And Dan's finding it very difficult to control his excitement. It's all about the sacred nature of bodily fluids, apparently, of people feasting on divine nectar in order to achieve immortality. And animals, which according to Hindu belief contain a soul on a journey, were not left out. Dan points out an example: "Here, a thoughtful young lady, is giving ... a dog, I believe ... a divine meal." Golly!