A slight brush with Rolf

After I'd recovered from the shock of discovering that Tony B Liar actually has a heart, I began musing on the fate of those public figures whose natural span has been cut short.

For example, if Princess Grace of Monaco were still alive today, she'd not only be scratching frantically at the lid of her coffin, but would also be well over 70, while James Dean would probably be an obese pensioner (a rebel without a corset), and Elvis the Pelvis would have become Elvis the Plastic Hip.

Che Guevara would be wearing his beret not as an act of defiance, but simply to cover his gleaming bald pate, Chairman Mao would long ago have received a Red Book from Michael Aspel, while Marilyn Monroe would be looking like a million dollars (all green and crinkly).

And Jackie Kennedy would doubtless be Zimmer framing her way on to chat shows, to tell us yet again how she bravely tried to protect her husband on that fateful day in Dallas by crawling out of the back of the car the moment the shooting started.

They all died long ago, but have stayed forever young in the iconic images made by Andy Warhol (a man who, by now, would probably have been prosecuted for mass producing copies of his own senior citizen's bus pass). So it's ironic that on last night's Rolf on Art (BBC1), Warhol's style was imitated by a man who has stayed forever old, Rolf Harris having looked exactly the same for the past 50 years, and being one of the few men on the planet who can make Val Doonican look like Johnny Rotten.

Dear old Rolfington is, of course, a staunch traditionalist who once famously declared that "modern art is a con", so in his current series on 20th century artists, he's largely avoided non-representational painting in favour of more easily assimilated figures such as Dalí, Chagall, Cézanne and Warhol. In short, as Mr Rotten himself might have said, never mind the Pollocks.

In 30 minutes, few documentaries could adequately convey the quiddity of a complex artist, but last night's edition didn't even try. Rolf spoke to us as though he were addressing a class of not particularly bright schoolchildren (something I don't object to, by the way, because he does it brilliantly), but the programme never seriously got to grips with its deceptively enigmatic subject, preferring to trot out a superficial hagiography, combined with the recreation of a few elementary techniques.

Studiously avoiding Warhol's taste for shock and outrage, we heard plenty about his interest in Campbell's soup cans and Brillo pads, but nothing about his pornographic movies or involvement with New York's drug-fuelled subculture, and when a nephew popped up to recall his visits to The Factory, what he described sounded like a visit to the Rainbow house.

Which is odd, because from everything else I've ever read about the place, you could barely get through the door without stepping over junkies shooting up in the doorway, and young males were highly unlikely to get out again without first incurring a prolapsed rectum, courtesy of "Uncle Andy" or his associates. Put it this way, the only woman that this New Yorker was ever inside was the Statue of Liberty.

In between slices of sanitised biography, Rolf replicated some of Warhol's basic silk-screen printing methods and made Marilyn-style images of Prince William. "There's a terrific resemblance to Prince Charles," he observed as the bare outlines of the face were coloured in (I wonder why he didn't include Prince Harry as well?), but once the ink had been squeegeed on, he noticed "the dark separations" (a long tradition at Buckingham Palace, so I understand).