Major spoiler alert: if you don’t want to know the ending of The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence, skip the next paragraph.

Still with me? Good. The answer is no, Richard III did not order the killing of the two princes. That was just Tudor propaganda. Both boys, the sons of Edward IV, survived, and escaped to Europe. Thence, supported by their aunt Margaret of Burgundy, they made separate, ultimately unsuccessful attempts to regain the throne for the Yorkists, one under the name Lambert Simnel, the other as Perkin Warbeck.

Rob Rinder’s job was to pretend not to know what was coming next

I’m telling you this not to be a spoilsport but to spare you 82 minutes of valuable life. Yes, the bare-bones story is fascinating, and researcher Philippa Langley deserves huge credit for her discoveries. What I don’t get is why Channel 4, rather than allowing her to tell it herself, insisted on roping in TV barrister Rob Rinder to sift the evidence and expertily deliver his expert verdict.

I’m a fan of Rinder, despite – or possibly because of – his eye-popping intensity and extravagant hand gestures. But dragging him into this felt like a calculated insult to the viewer. It said: ‘Look, we know you’re a bit thick. History is a bit of a mystery to you and you’re incapable of forming your own conclusions. So here’s TV’s Judge Rinder!’

A lot of the research depended on rediscovered manuscripts in continental archives. Rinder’s job was to accompany Langley in the hire car on jaunts to places like Lille and Arnhem, pretend not to know what was coming next (‘Where are you taking me?’, ‘Is this important?’), then, on seeing the 15th-century document being gingerly unfolded by some white-gloved curator, say something like: ‘Wow! No, double wow! In all my years as Britain’s top TV barrister, fighting any number of high-profile cases, this is the most amazing piece of corroborative evidence I have ever seen.’

What got lost on the way was much sense of the past. The archives were all modern (fine but why show us them?); the camera-work seemed anachronistically infatuated with wind turbines, lingering on them lovingly during every foreign trip; the historians – one in particular – were determined to show how groovy and unhistorian-like they were. And the set-ups were all so stilted, their artifice distracting you from anything you might have learned. In one, Rinder and Langley tramped across some countryside to the site of the Battle of Stoke Field, found an expert who could tell them a bit about it waiting there – as you do – then walked off again.

I had not dissimilar problems with Amazon’s 007: Road to a Million, a reality competition in which various couples representative of modern Britain – hijab-wearing sisters, a multi-ethnic couple, nurse friends – take part in sundry James Bond-style quests and dare-devil stunts in increasingly exotic locations to win £1 million per couple.

But if you think the producers are going to a) expose the contestants to any kind of serious danger, or b) give even one couple the chance to win the top prize, let alone several, then I have a spectacular Bond-style bridge across Sydney Harbour that I’d love to sell you.

For example, the scene where the lovable Cockney geezer brothers in search of a clue are required to break into a Venice apartment by clambering over a wall and entering through an upper-floor window, and then to precisely measure a six-foot boa constrictor coiled inside a trunk. How big a health-and-safety team did the insurers demand for that stunt, would you say?

On screen, the brothers gamely accomplish it. But all I could think of was the stuff that must have happened beforehand off-camera: crews to advise on correct ladder usage; advance warnings not to upset the live animal in the box; a snake-handling team showing how not to get bitten.

It was the same, I’m sure, when one of the nurses had to abseil down an ice wall on the Eiger to retrieve their next clue. All we saw were them disembarking from the train, finding some hard hats and climbing harnesses (such as all nurses know how to use, of course) and just gamely cracking on with it. Yeah, right.

As for that prize money, here’s a sample question: ‘Which of the following costs around £500,000? A) an Aston Martin DB5 Silver Birch; B) 24 bottles of Bollinger R.D. 1969; C) the maximum bet in a Monte Carlo casino; D) a four-acre Caribbean island; E) 25g of plutonium.’ See what I mean?

Mind you, the producers had to make the million pounds more or less unwinnable. Otherwise they would never have been able to afford Brian Cox as the Bond-villain presenter, pretending to observe the contestants’ every move through a bank of cameras and commenting sardonically on their efforts. At least we now know why Succession ended. Cox got an offer he couldn’t refuse and has since used the proceeds to buy his very own volcano-island lair.