It's a strange day when you find yourself grateful to Mickey Rooney for providing moral compass but, after 90 long minutes of Elizabeth Taylor: Auction of a Lifetime, that was where I found myself uttering an enfeebled cheer that someone, at last, had offered a tiny counterpoint to the programme's dazzled infatuation with glamour. Mickey, who was in at the start of Taylor's career on National Velvet, said that he thought her obsession with expensive trinkets was a bit "sad". A truly beautiful woman, he observed, doesn't really need precious stones. A truism, I guess, and not what I really hankered for, which was some Old Testament howl of rage at the shallowness of the rich (preferably backed up with a flame-thrower). But in the absence of anything better it had to do.
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