Oliver Cromwell: Warts And All (BBC1); Brinks Mat: The Greatest Heist (C4); CROMWELL would have got on well with Ebenezer Scrooge.

Like the Dickens character, he was no fan of Christmas and banned the festival, along with maypole dancing (no great loss in my opinion), and closed down ale houses.

The Warts And All documentary informed us that 200 taverns were shut down in Blackburn alone. Why this city was singled out for mention, I have no idea. Perhaps the producer used to live there.

The reason for this programme was an example of one series feeding off another. Auntie was wearing her educational hat and helping us understand the background to the excellent Sunday night drama Charles II. The Cromwell programme even began with a clip of Charles I's execution from the drama before asking the question: Cromwell - man of the people or brutal dictator? Discuss.

Ollie was a Puritan as well as an East Anglian farmer who "changed Britain's destiny". Jim Carter, seen the other week dodging lava in the BBC's recreation of the destruction of Pompeii, played Cromwell, who showed no signs of greatness as a young man.

The narrator divulged that his early life was only interesting for being so uneventful. Thank goodness for the programme-makers, that all changed. Religion, it hardly need be said, was the cause of all the trouble. Charles' love of the pomp and ceremony of the Church of England was at odds with Cromwell's Puritan streak.

Civil war ensued. This was the making of Cromwell (who, incidentally, coined the phrase "warts and all" when he insisted his portrait painter put his blemishes on canvas).

At 43, he had to learn his fighting skills from scratch - and a jolly good job he did too. But, like many a man before him, power corrupted. He rejected the crown but accepted the title of Lord Protector, along with the trappings of the monarchy.

He paid the price. Two years after his death, his rotting corpse was exhumed and taken to London for public execution. His head was stuck on a pike outside Westminster and left to rot for the 25 years of Charles II's reign. His torso was buried in an unmarked grave.

Equally informative was the Brinks Mat documentary which, using documentary, drama and police video reconstruction, proved as gripping as any fictional cops-and-robbers thriller.

Twenty years ago, a gang snatched £26m in gold bars from a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. To get to the vault, they had to get past 11 locks, neutralise five alarms and force security guards to give them the combination.

The amazing aspect is that they weren't after the gold but £1m in bank notes. When the guards couldn't remember the combination (understandably in a bit of a state, having been threatened with castration and/or being set on fire), the robbers turned their attention to some boxes. Inside were 680 bars of pure gold. Their haul had appreciated by £1m by the end of the day, as the market price jumped following the theft.

The first of the two-part documentary ended with some robbers in jail. The hunt for the gold continues next week, although we already know the ending - it still hasn't been found.

Published: 25/11/2003