Television is getting very passionate at the moment. Last week we had The Passions of Vaughan Williams on BBC4 and now comes Channel 4's Victorian Passions season, starting with Queen Victoria's Men. Like the Vaughan Williams documentary, it tries to be revisionist: suggesting that Queen Victoria was not the unamused, repressed matriarch of tradition but "hot-blooded" and "passionate".

The trouble is that there was nothing very new in this biography. Everyone knows that Victoria was passionately in love with Prince Albert (after all, they had nine children) and was suspected of being a bit too fond of her ghillie, John Brown. We were also told that Victoria was attracted to a couple of prime ministers: Lord Melbourne and Benjamin Disraeli. The story was ploddingly told, with reconstructions illustrating every event that the commentator described, padded out with irrelevant pictures of Windsor Castle and Osborne House. And the commentary was sometimes inept, as when Victoria and Albert's love was described thus: "Even after nine children, their chemistry between the sheets remained potent." However, the programme made the valid point that Victoria cultivated the image of "Victorian family values" to distance herself from her debauched royal predecessors.

Florence Nightingale (BBC1) unsurprisingly told us that Florence was a passionate woman, determined to uncover the appalling suffering she encountered during the Crimean War and bring much-needed reforms to hospital practices. Again there was a revisionist element, suggesting that the angelic 'Lady with the Lamp' was actually responsible for many deaths at Scutari because of her ignorance about sanitation. As with the documentary about Queen Victoria, Florence's talking direct to camera undermined credibility, and there was little new to learn.

Passion is certainly evident in a short series called Strangelove on Five. Last week's documentary was about two men who are in love with cars - and that means physical love (don't ask!). This week's programme was about a woman who is Married to the Eiffel Tower (Five) - another case of an unusual passion for inanimate objects. Naisho, an American woman, is not only in love with the Eiffel Tower but she also fancies the Golden Gate Bridge and a piece of fence she keeps in her bedroom.

It would be easy to laugh or be appalled, but the programme sheds some light on the origin of such strange sexual proclivities, which seem to arise in people just wanting to be loved. Naisho had a tough childhood: molested by her half-brother, deserted by her parents and living in foster homes. The programme also profiled Amy, another American lady who is in love with a funfair ride and a church banister rail. She, too, had a dysfunctional family background and suffers from Asperger's syndrome.

Perhaps music could help them. Oliver Stone - Tales of Music and the Brain (BBC1) was an "Imagine" programme which introduced us to Matt Giordano, a Tourette's sufferer whose symptoms disappear when he plays the drums. He has set up drum workshops to help other Tourette's victims. We also met Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon who suddenly became obsessed with hearing and then playing the piano, after he was struck by lightning. These and other people were presented by neurologist Oliver Sacks as examples of the remarkable power of music, which scientists still cannot explain.

Unexpected changes are also the theme of How TV Changed Britain (Channel 4), which at first looked like being just one more show compiling old film clips to make a programme. In fact, the first episode was revealing: showing how our attitudes towards the police have been changed by TV programmes. Dixon of Dock Green reassured us that policemen were kind and fatherly, but Z Cars and The Sweeney depicted the police being more brutal - an impression reinforced by news footage of the 1968 Grosvenor Square demo against the Vietnam War, and the Miners' Strike in the 1980s. TV documentaries were even instrumental in freeing the Birmingham Six and changing police procedures on rape.