WHEN we hear Donald Trump’s name it’s usually connected with nuclear war, which is terrifying, so it was almost pleasant to see it linked once again to good old prostitutes and pee.

This week’s Dispatches: Sex, Spies and Scandal (C4, Wednesday) sent Matt Frei to Moscow and New York to ask whether Donald Trump colluded with the Kremlin to win the presidency. There are investigations trundling on and on, so what conclusions, if any, have been reached?

It began with the now infamous “kompromat” which the Kremlin supposedly hold, and with which they could blackmail – or, at least, heavily influence – Trump. When he was in Moscow for the creepy Miss Universe pageant, the story goes that Trump was joined in the presidential suite of the Ritz by some prostitutes and they urinated on one another for his pleasure.

Now that’s a hideously colourful story, and his enemies would love for it to be true, but the programme prompted us to ask whether he’d be stupid enough to be compromised in that way. Anyone who lived through the Cold War, or who’s read a Russian espionage thriller, would suspect spying. Surely, the FSB would have had that suite bristling with spy cameras? Only a fool would allow himself to be caught doing anything dodgy in that room. But Trump is a fool, you say? Yes, of course, but his security team won’t have been so stupid.

One of Frei’s interviewees mocked the story; the idea that Trump’s team would have allowed a merry parade of Russian prostitutes, armed with plenty of drinking water, free access to his room is absurd.

So if the Russians don’t have any sexual “kompromat”, what else might they have? If lust isn’t Trump’s weak spot, then what is? Money, of course. It’s common knowledge that Trump has been repeatedly declared bankrupt and, as Frei reminds us, his name may be on the glitzy skyscrapers, but often that’s just showmanship. He is lending his brand to it, but who does the actual money belong to? Trump Tower is “all about the front, the gloss, the façade, but the money has come from somewhere else,” and so the tireless Matt Frei went to Washington and New York and uncovered lurid tales of Trump’s business connections with some suspect Russians, including a chap called Felix Sater who acted as a go-between in deals between Trump and Moscow, but who also once attacked a man with the broken stem of a cocktail glass, leaving him with 110 stitches.

These were deals where the “dividing lines between government and gangster, spy and businessmen, were sometimes blurred and indistinct”. Is Trump, or members of his team, compromised by financial obligations to Russian businessmen? We’re still waiting for a firm conclusion as to whether Trump, or his children, colluded with Moscow, and we can only hope that a conclusion is allowed to be delivered without interference, spin or whining cries of “fake news!” And we should also hope we’re all still around to hear it.

AND I need to end this week on a sad note – sad because I think the greatest comedy in the world is no longer great. It’s brilliant, still, but not great. Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sky Atlantic, Monday) always drew its finest moments from painful and unexpected awkwardness, and that seems to be missing from the current series.

The best example of the utterly unpredictable situations Larry would find himself in is to be found in “The Group” (Season 1, Ep 10). While out with his wife, Larry bumps into an ex-girlfriend. It’s awkward, yes, but who could predict that his idiotic attempts to avoid explanations would end up with him attending a support group for survivors of incest, and having to frantically make up an abuse story to explain his presence there? It is a perfect, agonising, brilliant episode. The viewer cringes and winces and shrieks “God, Larry! Don’t do it!” and you laugh despite being horrified.

That ruthless, wicked humour has gone, and we’re getting slapstick instead. This week, Larry made a rambling speech in court to protest a traffic ticket. Where once he was George Costanza, kicking back against all the needling, nagging nuisances of society, now he has turned into Kramer, a big, daft galoot playing for laughs.

Even a cameo from Salman Rushdie, where he tells Larry he gets great “fatwa sex”, was a dud. After the initial wow factor of seeing a great author in a sitcom, their scenes subsided into Carry On-type comedy: two old dudes grinning and winking about how the ladies like a dangerous man. Curb’s power lay in the slow, slow, agonisingly slow burn which erupted into fits of cringing when the story strands finally connect and we see the terrible mess Larry is in. This seems to have been ditched in favour of cheaper, quicker laughs.