Portrait of a failed royal marriage

Snowdon, alias Tony Armstrong Jones, was not only a philanderer but a successful photographer. After he married Princess Margaret in 1960, he kept dutifully to royal protocol, following a few steps behind the princess. But the constricting etiquette and Margaret's high-and-mighty ways were enough to drive Tony back to photography. They both had affairs with other people and, when Margaret's 'friendship' with Roddy Llewellyn was made public, Tony had an excuse for a divorce, allowing him to portray himself as the wronged husband. The documentary was well-researched, using interviews with the couple's friends and biographers, but, as so often, the programme was marred by the unconvincing reconstructions featuring actors who looked nothing like the real protagonists.

It's a funny old thing - love. Even funnier is television's (and much of society's) attitudes towards it. Many TV series (for example, the terrible Jeremy Kyle Show) depend upon such taboos as finding people guilty if they 'cheat' on their partners, but statistics (and programmes like the one about Snowdon and Margaret) suggest that adultery has seldom been uncommon. Society's uptight attitudes even prevented Princess Margaret from marrying Peter Townsend, just because he was a divorcee.

Channel 4's Victorian Passions season has been exposing some of the hypocritical taboos which pervaded Victorian society. The series concluded with Upstairs Downstairs Love, which illustrated Victorian hypocrisy through the story of the love affair between "a lowly servant and her gentleman master" which broke "one of the strongest taboos of the age: the great divide of class". It was theoretically unacceptable for a gentleman to be attracted to working-class women, even though many Victorian men actually frequented prostitutes, who numbered 80,000 in London's population of two million.

'Respectable' barrister Arthur Munby was attracted by brawny working women - particularly those who were grimy and sweaty from toil. He had a long, secret affair with the servant Hannah Cullwick, whom he eventually married - although she resented his attempts to turn her into a 'lady'.

The story was only uncovered when their diaries, letters and photographs, bequeathed by Munby to Trinity College in Cambridge, were revealed in 1950. The documentary's reconstructions were repetitive but credible. Strangely, the programme never mentioned that Munby was a poet, whose verse was well-thought-of in his day.

Microsoft proposed marriage to Yahoo, but was recently rejected after a long courtship. This may mean nothing to people without computers (sorry!) but it was headline news in the computer world, because Microsoft wanted to obtain Yahoo's advertising business so as to compete with Google. It was the latest in the many ups and downs which have affected Microsoft since it was founded by a couple of computer enthusiasts, one of whom was Bill Gates. Bill was interviewed by Fiona Bruce in Bill Gates: How a Geek Changed the World (BBC2). Fiona spoke to Bill's detractors as well as his admirers, so it was a fairly even-handed approach to the man whose company, Microsoft, made Gates huge amounts of money while attracting criticism from the likes of the US Government and the European Union.

One of the main criticisms was that Microsoft has tried to squeeze competitors out of the market - for example, by giving away its Internet Explorer system with its software (Windows) to crush its rival Netscape. Perhaps aware of the increasing threat from organisations like Google, Bill Gates now intends to reduce his work for Microsoft and concentrate on saving the world from disease through his Gates Foundation. In interview, Bill came across as an ordinary guy but he didn't seem to realise that his competitive practices have not made him universally admired.