HAVE YOU EVER wondered what Helen of Troy, she of the fabled face that launched a thousand ships, looked like? The answer, according to Bettany Hughes, presenter of Helen of Troy (ABC, tomorrow and next Sunday, 7.30pm), is that she probably resembled a modern circus clown.

It seems that no sultry Bronze-Age temptress would have appeared in public without lots of deathly-white face make-up, relieved by crimson lipstick and some dot patterns painted on cheeks and chin in the same shade of red. Her hair might have been worn long and tied in snake-like braids, or she might have shaved it off completely. A punk princess.

If this garish image disappoints, or at least disconcerts, those hoping for a Helen in the mould of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, that is part of Ms Hughes' aim. Helen of Troy is, among other things, an invitation to reflect on our notions of sexual allure and on why we are not more puzzled by them than some of us commonly are.

This documentary, which Hughes made for Britain's Channel Four to accompany her book Helen of Troy: Princess, Goddess, Whore, has all the strengths of television history at its best, and some of the weaknesses of the genre at its worst. It is well researched and serves up its scholarship in digestible doses for those who don't know their Ajax from their Achilles tendon. But Helen of Troy is also, as the ancient-history profession was quick to protest when it screened in Britain, tendentious in its conclusions.

There is more than a hint of jealousy in some of the scholarly carping about Hughes' work, which includes an earlier TV documentary series on the Minoans and a forthcoming one for radio on Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her academic credentials are eminently respectable - BA, MA (Oxon), in ancient and medieval history - and a conventional university career was certainly open to her. But she chose to write what the profession likes to call "popular" history instead and, an even worse offence in the eyes of some, becoming a television star as well.

"Star" is used advisedly. Hughes has become something of a phenomenon in Britain and there is even a fan website devoted to her, replete with comments from male viewers whose admiration evidently extends well beyond matters scholarly. A sample: "Loved the part of the recently aired Minoans when she told the story of how a notable queen had been enraptured by Zeus into having sex with a white bull. Woof, what a girl."

Woof, eh? Who says television isn't a cerebral medium?

Hughes' celebrity status has invited comparisons with Nigella Lawson, whom she resembles physically and whose television demeanour she may have emulated. Nigella fans may recall her cooking a barbecue, commenting that the aromas of the meat arouse feelings of primitive sensuality and then saying, eyes to camera: "I can almost feel the caveman swelling inside me." Hughes, too, enjoys this sort of tease. In The Minoans, standing at an achaeological site, she declares, eyes to camera, "This just cries out, 'Excavate me!' "

Helen of Troy also has its Nigella-isms. When Hughes finally sets out to trace the voyage of Helen and Paris across the Aegean she quotes, reasonably and inevitably, Marlowe's famous line about the face that launched a thousand ships, and what do we see? Hughes herself, at the prow of a yacht, scanning the horizon with her raven locks swept back and chest most definitely thrust forward.

It's the sort of thing that enrages her academic critics and no doubt leaves them feeling snootily vindicated. But they fail to notice that she is gently poking fun at them and her horde of panting fans. The simple fact is that she does look good and in consequence can make points about sexuality and power that get remembered by people who might otherwise never watch a historical documentary, let alone a discussion of gender politics. And yes, there are all sorts of sexist implications to that observation, which in a better world it might not be necessary to make.

That said, Some of Hughes' academic critics are on stronger ground in talking about the tendentiousness of her judgements. She wants to rescue Helen from myth and from literature written by men, and to reclaim her for history, a history of powerful, assertive women.

But, as she must know, the historical Helen, if there was one, is irrecoverable. The most she can offer is interesting conjecture about what a Bronze-Age princess might have been like, and the kind of influence, sexual, political and religious, that she might have wielded. That's a long way from a portrait of a real person but Hughes does not go out of her way to acknowledge this.

So let the critics have their say; but Hughes still comes out ahead. She has made watchable, intelligent television out of a subject that need not be confined to seminars but all too often is. Woof, what a historian.