Television - Andrew Billen is shocked and amused by the latest antics of Britain's most notorious cad

Yes, she agreed, she had adored him. But how could she? Why would even the most dim-witted Sloane Ranger fall for James Hewitt? By comparison, Diana Spencer's decision to marry Prince Charles was wisdom itself. This, at least, was clear within minutes of the start of Channel 4's indecently entertaining James Hewitt: confessions of a cad (24 July, 9pm).

This programme was a stitch-up, but a stitch-up in which the victim himself provided not only needle and thread, but a whole Singer sewing machine, complete with bobbins, spool caps and easy threading system. One hesitates to describe as stupid a former army officer who for 12 years has lived the life of a millionaire without actually holding down a job, but it was surely stupidity, laced with arrogance and greed, that persuaded "the most hated man in England" to agree to accessorise his egregious lifestyle with a documentary television crew, even if his vain hope was that the resulting programme would make his wretched love letters from the princess hotter property.

Hewitt went into the programme with two game plans that, far from being complementary, were mutually defeating. One was to act up to his bounder image. The second was to deny it. The confusion in his own mind tumbled forth outside a restaurant in London during a long, alfresco lunch conducted in the tradition, he joked, of the kings of France dining before the paupers. "They're doing this about me," he explained to an unamused pauper, "because I'm a complete shit and they're trying to make me [out] a less of a shit."

Of course they were, old chap. But if the directors, Mike Warner and Ariel White, had other ideas, so did he. Hewitt was intermittently taken with the concept of portraying himself as Terry-Thomas. In his chalet in Switzerland, he was interviewed sitting in a bubble bath. There were extra bubbles, he explained, extracting a curly, Sherlock Holmes-type pipe from his mouth, "because I'm a big boy". He had been a "bounder" from the age of seven months, when he squeezed his nanny's nipples. He would have loved to have had a wet nurse.

Back in London, however, he thought better of this Ealing Comedy approach. "I feel it's gone completely badly. I can't pretend it's all hunky-dory," he told the crew. The shittiness just wasn't working out tellywise. Nor was Plan B: his attempt to prove he had always been true to the princess in his fashion. Of course it wasn't: the programme was all about his blissfully unsuccessful attempt to sell the love letters, his final act of kiss and tell.

However he tried to explain it, the project did not look good. On CNN's Larry King Live, he was easily floored by a caller from Tucson, Arizona, who politely suggested that as he was now willing to let the letters go, he should give them to Diana's sons and let them decide their duty to history and the record book. "It's a jolly good point," he conceded, although it took Hewitt only the distance between the studio and his hotel room in LA to dismiss it.

His lawyer, Michael Coleman, whose job it was to flog the letters, was franker. If the letters went for £10m, they would earn him £8,000 in interest every week of his life. Who could resist that? In a perverse recreation of Jackanory, the creep later read out selected passages. The camera caught a glimpse of Diana's curly, schoolgirl hand and the microphones echoed with her dizzy, schoolgirlish spirit.

Coleman suggested that Hewitt's "dark side" was owing to his having never got over her. On the contrary, all the evidence suggested that there was nothing to get over. Hewitt, a little pissed, agreed with a friend that Diana was "one hell of a f**k". As for Charles, Hewitt reckoned he had done the prince a favour: "I should think he was grateful someone was looking after her while he was shagging Camilla Parker Bowles."

But as filming progressed, a tabloid discovered that Hewitt, although he told Larry King he had always been faithful to Diana, had at the same time had an affair with one Emma Stewardson - "a stupid, mad woman", as Hewitt gallantly called her. Stewardson, whose features reminded us how the princess might have looked in middle age, stood before her Aga and wished on behalf of the nation that Hewitt would "shut up and go away". Everybody wished that, she said.

Everybody, that is, except a few nitwit girlfriends, such as the bimbo who found his pornographic text messages to her a hoot. Even his army pals, lunching with him after a shoot (God, how this man lunched!), could find nothing good to say about for him except that he was "charming". Friendship with Hewitt, they strongly hinted, was a forlorn duty.

The final scene in the programme had Hewitt meeting Warner, his faux-naive, prolish TV interrogator, for one last time in Windsor Great Park. Hewitt had the grumps. "They never were for sale," he said now of the unsellable letters. He wandered off into the woods without, needless to say, any intention of doing the decent thing. Over the credits, his lawyer suggested he might try auctioning the Diana letters on eBay.

"O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!" Robbie Burns wrote. This was before the invention of reality television.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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