Albert Folens' widow isn't having any of it either, or so she says.

The upshot of her attempted interference with the second part of Ireland's Nazis was the insertion of a short voiceover stating that the Folens family refuted the claim that Albert Folens was a member of the Nazi party.

Almost in the next sentence, the programme stated that Folens was a Nazi. It went on to make a convincing case, making use of the accounts of personal contemporaries, and contemporary documents, and years of research into the story from journalist Senan Moloney. The viewer was left in no doubt as to the solidity of the charge against Folens, and credit is due, I think, to the programme makers for carrying through on their convictions.

But then when causes get this personal - as the cause of outing Ireland's Nazi fugitives is for presenter Cathal O'Shannon, an exRAF serviceman - it would have been wasteful to lose heart this far into the game. "It's time Ireland faced its Nazi past, which remains a dark stain on our recent history, " O'Shannon said, signing off rather dramatically on the show. The point wasn't that we should be storming into nursing homes, rounding up the one or two Nazis left in this country and pushing their heads down toilets. (They did manage to find one former Nazi, Staf Von Vethoven, and you could tell from the mumbles of encouragement behind camera that he and O'Shannon were getting on together like the two war veterans that they are. ) It's that we should never forget what ludicrous pieties the de Valeradreamt founding principles of Irish nationhood were - the same principles that made the anticommunist, discipline-obsessed Nazis a jack-booted wet dream to so many Irish nationalists.

More of the same old pieties were evident on Folk Hibernia, an entertaining if inevitably distorted tutorial on the evolution of Irish folk music in the last 60 years, which used archive film footage to set the social and political context. Clips of cailíní at crossroads were meant to illustrate how far both Irish music and the Irish nation have come since Dev was in his prime.

"The Irish folk revival is the story of Ireland's rocky rise from impoverished colonial upstart to modern European power, " the narrator told us. Well - after such a sweeping and inaccurate statement, you had to be on your guard for the rest of the show.

Sure enough, one set of pieties flowed from another. Now, not being an expert on the music of Planxty or Moving Hearts, I've no real idea of how valid the great claims regularly made for such acts are, but I know what I see from the snippets that shows like this feed me. In the case of Planxty: harmless céilí tunes dressed up with long hair and dope smoke; and Moving Hearts: a nightmare hybrid of Pink Floyd and the Wolfe Tones. When the Pogues showed up in the story, it was like a bolt from the blue - so invigorating, in fact, that you suddenly realised how much more they drew from their contemporary London influences than from Irish music.

In its own way too, Lilies, the BBC's new Friday primetime period drama, is fresh and different and could change your life if you allowed it to. There's an innocence and unselfconsciousness about it you don't get with other dramas about young people. It concerns three sisters in 1920s Liverpool, raised as Catholics by their late mother in a household governed by their staunchly Protestant father, and because it plays it so true to its historical setting - depicting the girls as naïve and inexperienced yet curious - it's very romantic.

Which made the ending to Friday's episode all the more shocking. The preview DVD that the BBC sent me came with a sticker saying: "In the interests of viewers' enjoyment, please do not give away the ending to this episode."

Remind you of anything? It reminded me of the famous plea on the posters for the film The Crying Game. As indeed the ending reminded me of 'that' scene in The Crying Game, except with the, eh, gender, and, ehrm, problem, reversed.

I haven't uncrossed my legs all weekend.

Reviewed

Hidden History: Ireland's Nazis Tuesday, RT�? 1 Folk Hibernia Friday, BBC4 Lilies Friday, BBC1