Sadly for Eoin O'Duffy, very few people remember him as anything other than a fruitcake. His great triumph was, as the first garda commissioner, to organise an unarmed police force at a time when the fledging Irish state was in the afterglow of violent turmoil.

In doing so, he set an example to the world. Outright insanity took hold about 10 years later. Kicked out of the gardai by Fianna Fail when it came to power in 1932, he was awarded the post of president of the new Fine Gael party. Around this time also, he founded the Blueshirts, motivated by the fascist movements on continental Europe. The farcical nature of O'Duffy's tin-pot rabble was exemplified by its disastrous Spanish civil war campaign: it killed more of its own men than the enemy.

Through all the trials and setbacks, however, O'Duffy's megalomania grew and grew. Not only did he suffer from delusions of grandeur, but self-denial: he preached temperance, yet he was an alcoholic; he saw himself as a paragon of Catholic values, yet there were questions about his sexuality.

This was a balanced and satisfying overview, complete with excellent, terse contributions from experts, and fleeting, dream-like dramatic recreations that should have been annoying but weren't . . .

they just added atmosphere.

Elvis Aran Presley was a good title for a programme about a search for the Aran sweater Elvis wore in Jailhouse Rock, but a better one would have been 'Memphis O Suilleabhain and the Geansai of Doom', as presenter Tom O Suilleabhain set out on an inevitably fruitless quest into the Presley heartland to retrieve the sacred artefact and bring it back to its rightful Aranmore home. Indiana Jones wasn't the only thing this reminded me of. It also had parallels with a documentary the comedian Frank Skinner made a number of years ago involving a silk shirt and a journey to Graceland, a programme that clearly, ahem, 'inspired' O Suilleabhain's effort.

The first thing you asked yourself about this particular exercise was: Say if he does find the jumper, will TG4 really stump up the tens of thousands of dollars it would probably require to buy it? The channel needn't have worried . . . the redundancy of O Suilleabhain's search became clear early on as he played the relevant scene from Jailhouse Rock to the Aran Islands' biggest knitwear expert. "I really don't think it's an Aran sweater at all, " the lady said straight off. Cannily, though . . . "But it's possibly a copy of the Aran style"; "What interests me is it looks like an Aran sweater" . . . the presenter managed to wheedle out a number of "tas" from the expert until he was satisfied with the legitimacy of his quest. "So there is a connection between this sweater and Aran, " he concluded/pleaded to his backers.

Pitifully and somewhat predictably, O Suilleabhain returned home with a copy of a copy . . . a cellophane-wrapped replica of the Jailhouse jumper, albeit one presented to him by Elvis's co-star Jennifer Holden. Oh well. At least we got to hear the King's wonderfully overheated rendition of 'Danny Boy' during the closing credits.

Despite her prominent billing, the desperately weak and reedy singing voice of La Ciccone was not heard much in Madonna:

Million Dollar Babies. Thank goodness for small mercies. I have never seen so many unsympathetic people in the one television programme. This was basically a bitchy commentary on the story of the singer's adoption of an African baby this year. Lining up to throw the coconuts was the very worst of the British tabloid press and celebrity-magazine world. Carole Malone of the Sunday Mirror is apparently "incandescent with rage" at Madonna's motivations and handling of the affair. Yuck.

Much more agreeable was Casualty 1906, a one-off medical drama which drew nothing from the programme it borrowed half its title from, apart from being set in a hospital. Everything depicted was based on records dating from Edwardian times. Blood, vomit, syphilis, saws, consumption, chloroform, catastrophic experiments with early x-ray machines, botched self-administered abortions, more pus than you could coat a stick with: there was nothing here you could fail to like from the safe, antiseptic distance of a century later.

Reviewed Hidden History: Eoin O'Duffy . . . An Irish Fascist, Tuesday, RTE One Elvis Aran Presley, Sunday, TG4 Madonna: Million Dollar Babies, Thursday, UTV Casualty 1906, Sunday, BBC1