Families Behaving Badly (five)

Princes In The Tower (C4)

REALITY shows like Supernanny and Brat Camp have made us used to youngsters behaving badly. They swear, they rage, they hit out. But the Foul-Mouthed Kids in five's new series about parenting skills were the worst yet.

The Wards live in a house where shouting and swearing are the norm. Eight-year-old Savannah doesn't call mother Lisa "mum", she calls her a bitch. One of her first sentences on the programme contained the f-word six times. Four-year-old Cameron refuses to sit at the table for meals, spits and calls his mother the c-word.

Even the normally-unshockable must have been taken aback by the level of language and behaviour in a house where there are "no manners, no rules, no nothing".

There isn't much love on show, behaviour specialist Lorrine Marer pointed out. The parents were as bad as the children. It was obvious they were the cause of the children's bad behaviour. The youngsters were following by example.

As Marer watched footage of the mayhem that passed for the Wards' home life, she was prompted to observe that "I'm going to sew this man's tongue to the roof of his mouth" as father Colin berated his children and told Cameron, "You're a twat, like your mum."

Marer's fellow helper, butler and manners expert Sean Davoren, looked so appalled I thought he'd refuse to enter the house of horrors. He did, although he left most of the talking to Marer.

She pointed out all the negativity in the house. The parents never praised their children, just shouted and swore. Getting the whole family to assemble a large dining table as the first task seemed ill-advised because everyone knows how putting together flat-pack furniture causes dissent among loved ones.

Surprisingly, it worked. The children fell into line. It was the parents who resisted Marer's ideas. Colin, in particular, didn't like being told what to do. By the end, Lisa was admitting a lot of what the expert said was very successful.

So, a happy ending of sorts. No such thing for the Princes In The Tower. What happened to the young royals isn't known. The popular theory is they were suffocated on the orders of their uncle Richard III.

C4's two-hour slice of dramatised history speculated on one possible solution to a mystery that's intrigued people over the years. It centred around the man who, eight years after the princes' disappearance, returned to claim the throne as Richard, Duke of York - the man who became known as Perkin Warbeck.

He claimed to have survived the murderous attempt on him and his brother. He had the right birthmark. He knew things only the real prince could know. Queen Elizabeth was convinced. Others thought he'd been sent as part of a plan conceived by the Duchess of Burgundy.

This version had a sting in the tale that no-one could have seen coming.

It may not have settled the question once and for all, but it made for a gripping dramatised documentary.