Last night's TV

Being lord of the manor is all well and good, but beware these four words: open to the public
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Sissinghurst BBC
'There are about 50 people working here, and they don't always see eye-to-eye' ... Sissinghurst. Photograph: BBC/Keo Films/National Trust Photo Library/Penny Tweedie

I feel a bit sorry for Adam Nicolson. He lives in this big fat house called Sissinghurst (BBC4, Sunday), which is where his mum and dad used to live, and before that his nan, who was a famous gardener and writer called Vita Sackville-West. Vita had a husband, Harold, but she also used to get jiggy with ladies, lots and lots of them, including another writer called Virginia Woolf. And Harold, as well as being married to Vita, liked men. It was like that back then.

Anyway, back to Adam. The reason I feel sorry for him is that Sissinghurst doesn't belong to him any more. Like the soap impression of the wife of the man in the crowd with the multi-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots in the Beatles song, it was donated to the National Trust. And that means Adam has to share the place with the public. Every morning the poor chap opens his curtains and there's riff-raff all over the lawn. Imagine it.

So it's kind of his, but not his. It also means that there are about 50 people working there - running the gift shop, the restaurant, clipping Vita's box hedges and pruning her wisterias, selling tickets, managing, ushering in the coaches, etc. And they don't always see eye-to-eye - with each other, or with Adam. He's not happy that there's no mention in the exhibition that his nan was gay, for a start. So he does some publicity for himself. "Do you know the story of this place?" he asks four American ladies in the garden. "Do you know it's the lesbian capital of England?" The poor dears, they only came for the roses, and the kinda lord of the manor wants to turn it into some kind of gay theme park.

To be fair to Adam, he does his best to see it from everyone's viewpoint, recognises that it's not just him who has emotions invested in the old place. It must be hard, being only kinda lord of the manor. I wouldn't want to live there at all - with all these strangers wandering around, Americans, bumping into the ghosts of me as a boy, my parents, my grandparents, and all their dozens of same-sex lovers. It's surprisingly fun to watch though, being a fly in a walled garden.

There was more splendid faded grandeur in The Maharajas' Motor Car: The Story of Rolls Royce in India (BBC4, Sunday). These dudes were the oil sheiks of their day, and back then (we're talking around 1908) the thing to have wasn't an English football club, but an English luxury motor. Specifically, a Roller, the self-proclaimed best car in the world. They ordered them by the half-dozen.

The princes specced them up to the max, adding every possible extra - bars, tea sets, extra-polite bells to shoo sacred cows from the road in front. Some of these cars were specially customised - for transporting ladies in purdah, or personal cricket teams, or for shooting tigers from. I think shooting a tiger from inside a Rolls Royce in India is the very pinnacle of decadence. Lovely.

But then these events came along to spoil it all - the second world war, independence (you wouldn't catch Gandhi in a Rolls), the Maharajas' subsequent loss of power and wealth. Boo. And now most of the beautiful "mechanical elephants" are no longer on the road.

The best line in the first of the new series of Dirty Sexy Money (E4, Sunday) comes from Patrick Darling. "I'm going to take a shower," he says to his wife Ellen. "And try to wash whatever's left of this marriage off my body." Ouch. I need to try that one out on my girlfriend next time we have a row.

Actually maybe not, because a minute later Ellen's attacking Patrick in the shower with a metal bar. But then she slips and lands badly, on her head, sadly killing herself. Damn. Now Patrick's marriage really is a mess, all over the bathroom floor - all bloody and broken-glassy from the smashed shower door.

Dirty Sexy Money is pretty silly, but no one can accuse it of lacking drama. When they're not killing each other, they're screwing each other, in every sense of the word, but mostly in the obvious way. And absolutely everyone, as far as I can work out, is at it with everyone else. It's like Sissinghurst, back in the good old days.

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