The front line of the BBC’s battle to raise the next generation’s level of knowledge a couple of notches above shameful is BBC3. So it’s unsurprising this should be the channel that throws up the most mutations in Auntie’s DNA – to overstretch the metaphor a tad. Last Man Standing is an interesting example of a new genre created by this evolutionary process. Part documentary, part reality show, part sports programme, this eight-week series is best described as “anthropology aggro”.

Six fit young men, experts at their particular sports, travel the world. They meet people from different tribes and cultures. They ogle the topless tribeswomen. They learn about the tribe’s ways. They live with them and experience their culture first hand.

Then they pick fights with them.

Since this is the BBC, of course, we can’t possibly send a bunch of fit young men to foreign climes, simply to beat up the natives – that’s a bit too old school British Empire. Instead, as well as making sure half the competitors are American, we give the natives a sporting chance by letting them pick the fight rules – and by sending guys with little or no experience in the natives’ sports.

The first episode is an instructive example. Our intrepid hextet are flown out to Brazil to meet the Kalapolo tribe. The Kalapolo like to wrestle. They wrestle with each other. They wrestle with other villages’ tribes. They wrestle from when they’re kids until old age.

Instead of sending experts in judo, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, sombo or even someone who did wrestling in high school or at college – in other words, people who might stand a chance – we send a weightlifter, a runner/mountaineer, a fitness guru, a kickboxer, a cricket/rugby player and – wait for it – a BMX racing champion. Needless to say, the home team do quite well and the away team, with their whole week of training, don’t exactly triumph.

And so it continues for the rest of the series, as the fighters brave Zulu stick fighting, Mexican endurance running, Nagaland kickboxing, Mongolian wrestling, Tobriand cricket, Wolof wrestling and Sepik canoe racing. Even when it might seem like we stand a chance (the kickboxer with the kickboxing contest, the cricket with the cricketing contest and the runner with the running contest, for example), injuries or freak accidents prevent the favourite from winning. All the same, skill at one sport seems to be a relatively transferable skill, with our heroes doing surprisingly well at some of the events.

In true British Raj style, though, we prove to be best at the after-contest activities. Jason, the BMX champion – who just happens to be a tree surgeon as well – is great at chopping trees. Brad, the weightlifter, can help the Brazilians carry the trees afterwards. Corey, the endurance runner, also happens to be a rower so helps with the boating and so on. We’re prepared to give their languages a go, speaking Spanish to the Mexicans, French to the Senegalese and giving pidgin a brave attempt, too, when faced with Papua New Guinea tribesmen disconcertingly called Dominic and Paul. All it needs is a bit of tonic water and a slice of lemon to really recreate that Jewel in the Crown feel.

It does seem a bit odd, though, that a different contestant every week feels the need to visit the local shaman and learn about the local magic. Documentary fixing at the Beeb? Surely not …

Since it’s BBC3, we also have the tried and tested gross factor at as many possible points as possible, just to ensure those feckless kids have got something to keep them watching through the dull bits. The most bizarre sport featured – Mexican endurance running – involves running a marathon round a village while kicking a wooden football and wearing a pair of shoes made from recycled tyres. Needless to say, the foot injuries are spectacular. Rajko, the fitness guru, nearly sliced off one of his own toes while chopping wood for the Trobriand. And since our contestants need to get their own food to eat, we have I’m a Celebrity … style bush-tucker grub-eatings as well as far more harrowing Mongolian practices: animal lovers would have been well advised to steer clear of that episode, which involved cutting open a sheep, reaching inside it and severing one of its arteries, as well as the equally horrific removal of lambs’ testicles while they’re still alive and squealing. By the end of the contest, most of our contestants are thinking about becoming vegetarians.

Yet for all this cynicism, Last Man Standing is actually a surprisingly touching and endearing show. Anyone expecting a bunch of arrogant jocks would be sorely disappointed by our personable contestants. While the Americans do have the edge in the confidence stakes over the more self-effacing Brits, everyone involved turns out to be a really nice guy who regards the whole thing as a privilege, wants to learn as much as possible about the native culture, and keeps the trash-talking to a minimum. They’re touched by the generosity of the people they stay with – one of the Mexicans gives up his house and sleeps outside so that the contestants have somewhere to stay. They’re surprisingly sensitive, with Jason, the BMX champion, getting deeply upset by the tree burning and eco-system devastation practised by the Mongolians, for example. There’s true bravery displayed: the nearly-toeless Rajko marches out onto the Trobriand cricket field, against doctor’s orders, to win the game for the villagers, who are playing for their honour against a nearby village and are trailing badly, in an ending that would have looked implausible in a movie – even Richard, the cricketer and previous favourite who was winning until that point, has to admit you can’t argue with heroism and one villager goes on to name her child after Rajko, such is the esteem he’s brought to the village. They even take time out to help others who fall behind.

And when the contest proves to be a dead heat, with three of the athletes having won two events each, they generously cast a ballot to decide among themselves who deserves the crown and unanimously declare Jason overall winner because of his attitude and self-development.

It’s interesting to compare the show with the other “anthropology agro” series currently doing the rounds: Human Weapon, over on the US History Channel. In this, a pro-wrestler/American footballer and a mixed martial arts champion travel the world to traditional martial arts hotspots like Japan and the Philippines, as well as lesser-known areas such as Israel and Greece, where they learn about the culture and history, and – you guessed it – pick fights with the natives.

The show is far more geared up for martial arts fans than Last Man Standing. While the British show is content to explain the rules and have the narrator, Richard Hammond, cast an amused and slightly superior eye over the sport’s training practices, Human Weapon has blow-by-blow instructions, explanations of the physics of the art and lovingly CGi-ed illustrations of virtual men hitting each other from every possible angle.

Yet, while Human Weapon is at least as educational as Last Man Standing and the hosts equally as affable and downright pleasant as their counterparts over here, without the reality show element, we end up learning very little about them and the show seems far less involving. Yes, it’s cool watching a Kali master wrestling a water buffalo, but do we know how much the hosts miss their families and want to make them proud, like Brad does (something that prompts one village to put on a birthday party to cheer him up)? Do we know what their hobbies are, as we do with Mark the Samba-dancing kickboxer? Were their upbringing and childhood as troubled as Jason’s, the true Last Man Standing?

BBC3 are already recruiting for a second series, so it’s to be hoped that while some cross-pollination occurs between the two shows, giving Last Man Standing something that martial arts aficionados as well as anthropologists can get their teeth into, the formula stays much the same. Because even if you aren’t an attention-deficit teenager, the show is an engrossing, entertaining – and indeed – educational programme that makes you care about its contestants and shows you people, customs and sports you probably never knew about – and won’t have seen on primetime BBC1 or BBC2.

The Secret Millionaire has a simple premise that you can pretty much guess from the title. A millionaire goes to live in an impoverished community, disguised in the everyday uniform of a poor person. He or she tours the neighbourhood – as inconspicuously as possible for someone with a camera crew in tow – hunting for someone or something that would most benefit from a healthy big wodge of cash. Then, in a grand unveiling at the end of the show, the moneybags puts on a suit, writes some cheques and there’s a lot of crying as various people who had been kicked in the nuts by life realise everything’s about to change for the better (hopefully).

Although cosmetically different, The Secret Millionaire often betrayed its Wife Swap-ian origins, despite failing to send any homeless to live in the millionaires’ properties for a couple of weeks. The penultimate episode, featuring office rental mogul Paul Williams and his son, illustrated the link the clearest.

Williams, who had grown up in a middle-class household, provided the culture shock amusement so necessary to Wife Swap, after moving to the Thorntree estate in Middlesbrough. Previous episodes had thrown various self-mades into poor neighbourhoods; however, since all involved had once been poor themselves, they simply reverted to former habits without suffering visibly. Williams, who now lives on a nicely secluded estate with a tribe of fellow millionaires, demonstrated a complete inability to talk sensibly to anyone outside his normal social sphere. He couldn’t understand the accents and tried to start conversations with, “Tell me about your business. I’m interested in businesses.” Going into a pub full of men’s men and ordering a half? No. No. No. It was the sort of embarrassment that Wife Swap would happily have sneered at, before chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, his son was demonstrating university has become a great equaliser for much of the population. While his father was looking for someone he could talk to without being stared at strangely, he was getting on just nicely thank you at a local homeless shelter. The experience was new to him, but he was never condescending, got on just fine and was profoundly affected by his experience, proclaiming he’d like to stay and work in the shelter permanently, given half a chance.

In the end, when it was time to leave, Williams unsurprisingly gave considerable sums of money to the hostel and everyone whom he’d befriended, in a scene that surely had viewers in tears as much as everyone involved.

However, for real tear-jerking majesty and as an antidote to all possible cynicism towards the series, you didn’t have to look any further than the final episode. This was cunningly split from the others by Christmas and New Year and moored in a different time slot on a different day: can we all assume, right now, that series two looks unlikely?

The episode featured the only female millionaire of the series, Emma Harrison (last seen in C4′s 2005 business reality show Make Me a Million). Every inch of her was heart-warming. Raised single-handedly by her father, she had an absentee mother, who returned just long enough for Harrison to nurse her back to health from tetraplegia and bone cancer before leaving again. A prodigious philanthropist, she’s turned over part of her mansion to her many friends and family so they can share her the wealth. She made her millions ethically, too, retraining unemployed steel workers so they could start new careers. So far, so shaming.

She entered the utterly depressing Dagenham with nothing but optimism and good thoughts, desperately wanting to find someone to help. Unlike the other episodes, where it was difficult to determine just how much RDF’s research team had pre-selected targets for the millionaires’ largesse, Harrison had the get-up-and-go necessary to find her own lucky recipients, along the way braving some of the bleakest, most pessimistic people you could ever hope to encounter. She became a cleaner at the local pub, worked at a pie and mash shop, scoured the library for information on charity groups, and stopped strangers on the street for local information.

Eventually, she found the three most deserving cases she could: Crossroads, a charity that supports the carers of severely disabled children; the unemployed parents of one of those children; and a little old lady who at nearly 80, still manages to volunteer four days a week with adults with learning difficulties and greets every new arrival in the neighbourhood with cakes and conversation. Rather than hand over the cash and run, Harrison supplemented Crossroads’ £30,000 with the free services of one of the country’s leading fundraisers; and told the mother she was going to sponsor her to do a Masters degree and then give her a job. The little old lady? She now regards her as the mother and grandmother she always wished she’d had. If that doesn’t simultaneously humble you, make you cry and fill your heart with joy, nothing will.

Despite the judgement of people’s lives required to pick the lucky winners and the obvious point that RDF is going to make plenty of money from the show, it’s very hard to come away any conclusion except that good has been done here. While it’s easy to judge reality TV harshly as a genre and claim it brings out the worst in people, shows like The Secret Millionaire demonstrate that it can have as many benefits and be as illuminating as film and serious journalism – all while being entertaining.

For all the Beeb’s talk of inclusivity, when was the last time you saw a documentary looking at some of the country’s most run-down areas? When did any of those documentaries avoid the trap of focusing purely on the bad, but looked at some of the good being done by churches, youth groups, government, businesses and the residents themselves in these areas? More importantly, when did they ever do anything except record and hope to inspire others to good works?

The Secret Millionaire, despite being dressed up as reality TV, was a worthy, relatively balanced series of documentaries that was willing to pony up the cash for its subjects. In comparison to Wife Swap‘s synthetic class, race and sex wars, it was a worthy penance.

It’s possible for a show to be doing all the right things, yet be let down by one element so badly, that watching it becomes akin to having a kidney removed by over-enthusiastic gibbons. So it was with The Outsiders, ITV1′s attempt to marry the fun spy escapism of ’60s shows like The Man from UNCLE with the glamour and plots of modern US series such as 24. Top-secret spy agencies with entrances in antiquarian bookshops; bungie-jump interrogations; the Vatican’s secret ninja police: it could have been fun.

But there’s always something vaguely embarrassing about British shows that try to emulate American genres. It’s like watching your dad trying on leather trousers. The Outsiders was no different in that regard, even if did at least succeed in matching its US cousins in a few areas. With a cast that included Colin Salmon and Brian Cox, the acting was more than serviceable and almost star-studded; there was an impressive fight scene that easily outdid most American shows; and the shadowy organisation – Minus 12 – to which ex-EastEnder Nigel Harman’s former top-secret operative-come-cook reluctantly returns had the same pleasing amorality as SD6 and company.

Indeed, with its use of continental night clubs as handy boltholes for evading the baddies, The Outsiders clearly had ambitions of being a UK version of the globetrotting Alias, right down to Minus 12′s attempt to recover a Renaissance artist’s Fountain of Youth, a MacGuffin that pretty much mirrored Alias‘ five-season long quest for Rambaldi’s secrets. While its budget was microscopic in comparison, The Outsiders was still able to convey a certain exoticism, even if attempts to depict sunny Mediterranean hideaways tended to leave the bitter taste of a summer holiday in Dorking in their wake instead.

At first glance then, the problem might have appeared to have been the plot, which was entirely derivative, full of holes the size of double-decker buses and clichés that were old and cobwebbed decades ago. A man and a woman handcuffed together and on the run? Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. A spy in hiding from the organisation he used to work for? The entire Bourne series of films and just about any US action show from the ’80s. Yet, it was certainly no worse than many successful and infinitely better programmes and could easily have classed itself as an “homage” if it had so wanted.

No, the glaring, motorway pile-up of a flaw that transformed The Outsiders from a potentially sublime piece of throwaway nonsense that anyone could enjoy into something that could be used in Guantanamo as an interrogation technique was the dialogue. If dialogue were an animal, then The Outsiders‘ would be smallpox.

An early exchange about the difficulties of jogging backwards (Anna Madeley: “It must be hard”; Harman: “What?”; Madeley: “Jogging.” Harman: “It gets boring going forward all the time.” No doubt he sometimes mixes it up by also scuttling sideways like a crab in Nikes) was followed by a ludicrous “seduction” scene which involved a watered down but lengthy and bewildering discussion of the mating habits of lobsters.

The show’s characters then carried on running their nails down the dialogue blackboard with posturing and threats that would have got them laughed out the average playground, intermixed with heavy-handed plot exposition that might as well have been stuck on placards for all their subtlety.

The situation could, potentially, have been rescued if any of the cast had twigged the dire situation they were in and injected some knowing humour into their performances to make the show a modern version of The Avengers. Instead, it was left to Brian Cox as the sinister head of Minus 12 to unilaterally camp things up. It was a turn that suggested not only a good pair of running shoes, ready for the moment his salary hit his bank account, but the possibility that this was Bluetooth Brian Cox, the real model phoning in his performance from Pasadena.

The result instead? An awe-inspiring disaster in every way: Ed Wood’s “Cut! That was perfect,” echoed loudly and clearly from every scene. Coming just days after a Cracker special, it was good to be reminded that that was the exception that proved the rule of ITV1′s rock-bottom quality threshold.

Still, with viewing figures that just beat the BBC1′s competing The Amazing Mrs Pritchard and with ITV1 desperate for even the slightest thing that looks like a ratings success, there is, unfortunately, the looming horror of a potential follow-up programme to this obvious pilot. In fact, the normally reliable writer Caleb Ranson has already cooked up plots for an eight-part series and would love to do 22, according to an interview in The Stage. The critical mauling the programme garnered might be enough to stop this happening, but if there’s any doubt, there’s no better time to write to your MP than now.

There are few more costly ways of making money than property development. Hundreds of thousands, are needed to be a professional developer just for the raw materials and the building. Then there’s the time and labour, not to mention the market research. If it all goes wrong, you could end up bankrupt or in debt for the rest of your life. Given those horrible fates, wouldn’t you at least watch Property Ladder first?

To say it’s amazing Property Ladder has been running for so long with more or less the same formula is an understatement. Each episode goes like this: rich and talented property developer Sarah Beeny visits various amateurs as they try to make a mint from converting some loft into a space-age “space”. She gives them advice on where they’re going wrong. They do their development. She returns at various stages – with continually varying hairstyles and pregnancy bump – to see how they’re doing. At the end, the developers get a few appraisals then try to sell the property. It’s simple, right?

Yet, despite the fact Ms Beeny has been giving more or less the same advice for umpteen series, there seem to be legions of novices for whom it’s all new. Surely even the laziest of these neophytes will have noticed that the formula, which has been constant throughout Property Ladder‘s long reign in Channel 4′s schedules, also demonstrates that anyone who ignores Beeny’s advice ends up regretting it? It happens every single episode. They come up with some stupid ideas, like placing alabaster gnomes in every room as a motif. She tells them to do something more sensible and that’ll cost them less. They ignore her advice. Their plans go wrong. So they change their minds, do as she said, and everything starts to go right again.

But there are apparently so many people willing to ignore Beeny that for at least the last couple of series, the show has been able to up the stakes by following two developers per episode. Neither of them listen, both end up in trouble.

The appeal of the programme for many isn’t just the insight it gives into the complexities of property development, the skills needed and simple schadenfreude. Instead, it’s the sheer number of different faces Beeny can pull when presented with complete idiots, while still remaining diplomatic.

This latest run has been no different from any other in that respect. In the second episode, Beeny was faced with someone who had bought a listed flat at auction without realising he’d have to pay £75,000 to help repair the rest of the block; who hadn’t read any of the sale documents because there were too many of them; and didn’t know what “listed” meant.

She managed to pull an incredible series of faces at each step of the way, something speaking of a lost career in silent movies or gurning, yet never actually lost her temper with the witless wonder who forced his mother to remortgage her house to help him pay for his idiocy. Even when he let slip that he thought Victorian meant 1950s – ’60s did Beeny let rip with bulging eyes and the mild, “What’s a 100 years, hey?” It takes a great deal of comic skill to realise that the unseen audience doesn’t need you to cue the laughter that much when it’s so obviously going to be coming soon.

A further new twist of recent years has been the “revisited” strand that concludes each series. These are repeats of previous series’ episodes, with an extra 10 minutes of footage tacked on as Beeny returns to the original developers to see what’s happened since the series has been made. Miraculously, most of them seem to have grown stupider since the previous series. Tonight, for instance, Beeny returned to find one group now over a million pounds in debt; another developer had somehow managed to develop two properties and begin looking for a third, all without having sold a single site. You’d have thought she would have realised she’d done something wrong along the way, but her response to the multi-millionaire Beeny’s advice? “I’m afraid I’m going to ignore you.” Beeny’s “at least you’re honest” shows what an unrecognised deadpan comedy genius we have in our midst.

The formula is wearing a little thin, it has to be said. We all need a little variety in our lives and there’s not a huge amount from series to series. Occasionally, we’ll get a treat like the man who bought a house in the middle of nowhere that only had a narrow access road. A quick trip with Beeny to a warehouse that sells car turntables enlivened proceedings no end, particularly when he then decided to put a hot tub in the garden. But most are the same kind of development with entrepreneurs making the same mistakes as always: no planning permission, no idea how to project manage, no concept of how to do any work themselves, but an expectation that builders will teach them how to do it.

Nevertheless, the formula still works, and it’s unclear why it still endures. Sarah Beeny’s skills as a presenter and developer give it a certain something. The different kinds of property provide an architectural frisson, too. Wanting to find out which silly idea the developers are going to want to implement next is a lure.

At a deeper, more sub-conscious level, the clear system of morality, in which the badly behaved (those who ignore Beeny) get punished by fate, while those who do good works (those who take her advice) get rewarded, is an additional possible explanation. But when things do go wrong and people suffer serious financial hardship and relationship disasters, Property Ladder becomes almost painful to watch. It’s fair to conclude that the show really hits its stride when nothing too bad happens to anyone, but the stupid do get punished a little bit, at least.

It is perhaps the constant search for the new developer who actually listens to Beeny that keeps us all watching. Like a rare butterfly to a lepidopterist or an endangered eagle to an ornithologist, the smart party who blooms and prospers by following her advice can get us through an entire series of lead-paint sniffing, swaggering fools who want to make money for doing nothing.

Would we want to watch a series populated entirely by smart developers, though? Probably not. Without her clueless straight-men, how could the comic genius of Beeny be exposed?

For as long as she and her ever-changing entourage of the clueless endure, Property Ladder will probably continue. Some tweaking here and there wouldn’t go amiss and just the occasional rare eagle of a savvy developer would help us through the worst patches. But it remains a formula that’s likely to weather changes for some time to come.

You pretty much know what you’re going to get when you watch a documentary on five entitled The Man Whose Arms Exploded. It might have been shown as part of the Hidden Lives strand, but it would have been equally at home in Channel 4′s Bodyshock range, where the name of the game is medical grossness crossed with faux human interest.

Gregg Valentino was in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest biceps in the world. He achieved this through the usual body-building skills of workouts and diet, in conjunction with an additional fillip – injections of steroids at doses normally used to help racehorses cheat.

He didn’t know when to stop, so nature gave him some pointers. His arm soon became infected, thanks to a sterilisation policy for his needles that could generously be described as “blowing the dust off the tips”. Despite some self-administered surgery, he had to be rushed to hospital where his biceps more or less fell apart thanks to a massive haematoma that needed to be hacked away.

If that had been the extent of the story, it would have been a warning – although quite what of, it’s not entirely clear. But Valentino also became a steroid dealer during his worst periods. He became involved with gangs and came close to being murdered, with only the timely intervention of his girlfriend with a shotgun saving his life. The cost to him was still dear. Not only did his girlfriend die of a drugs overdose, he lost a million dollars of his competition winnings and was arrested and imprisoned for dealing.

The supposed aim of The Man Whose Arms Exploded was to show the terrible intertwining between professional bodybuilding and steroids. But it’s hard to give that explanation too much credence. Valentino’s story is just so outlandish, it would be hard to find anyone who could truly identify with him. Would you not only perform your own surgery and tape it for posterity, but let it be televised internationally? Valentino is almost certainly in a very tiny minority. Anyone thinking of taking steroids is highly likely to think that no matter how bad things get, they’ll never let it get as bad Valentino did – no matter what happens.

The one test of the cautionary value of this tale presented in the programme was of a young Englishman, Joe Middleton, embarking on a bodybuilding programme and considering taking steroids. Unsurprisingly, Valentino didn’t really have as much of an impact on him as the programme makers might have hoped. So as with most of these bodyshock shows, it’s clear this was intended less as warning and more as a draw-in for the prurient.

All the same, sandwiched around the almost literal freakshow that is Valentino was an interesting documentary on steroids, their effects and their use by bodybuilders. The programme gave a reasonable rendition of the modern history of bodybuilding, starting from its popularisation by Arnold Schwarzenegger and working through to the present day.

Bodybuilding’s effect on the ideal of masculine physical perfection was well illustrated using the changing musculature of Luke Skywalker action figures of all things: Darth Vader’s lovechild has been getting a significant bulking up over the decades as bigger has become decidedly better. In turn, that change in ideal has led to the modern phenomenon of “bigorexia”, the bulking-up male’s equivalent of anorexia where big is never quite big enough.

To the growing boy, worried about his looks and unwilling to face the years of gym and protein shakes necessary for building muscle the natural way, steroids can seem like a short-term lifeline, whose long-term effects are so far off they can be ignored, the programme argued. Rather than condemn outright this attitude, it took a more nuanced view, giving time to steroid guru Mick Hart, who provides advice on healthy (or possibly “healthy”) steroid-usage through his newsletter No Bull.

To counterpoint this, there were interviews with former Mr Universe Steve Milchalik, who has suffered liver tumours, a heart attack and a stroke thanks to the steroids prescribed to him by doctors during the ’70s. The programme itself didn’t come to any real conclusion about whether steroids were a true evil or an acceptable one, leaving that decision up to the viewer.

Yet despite this intelligent yet flawed exploration of steroids, Valentino was the star attraction and the centre of attention. It was his story most people were there to see – if only from behind the sofa – and unfortunately, he took up the most screen time. The programme makers certainly seem to think that old-school issues journalism needs to have a shock component to help the medicine go down.

Unfortunately for them, if there was one true message the programme gave us, it was that no matter how clever and sophisticated you might make a documentary, it’s hard to forge a lasting argument when your centrepiece is an extended clip of a man siphoning pus from his own arm into a tumbler.

The F Word is a double entendre. On the face it, it would appear to be a show about cookery, with the F obviously standing for food. In actual fact, it’s about swearing.

When a second series of The F Word was first mooted, it was hard to see what changes Channel 4 were going to make to the format. The first series of the Gordon Ramsay-fronted magazine programme for food lovers hadn’t done as well as commissioners had hoped and so they planned to tweak it. But since it was already such a mixture of every other cooking show already, incorporating elements from Jamie’s, Nigella’s and all the other celebrity chefs’ menu of tricks, it was hard to see what they were going to do to invigorate it as they had promised.

Judging by the results, their main aim was to get Gordon Ramsay to swear as much as possible.

The first big change was the removal of slightly annoying restaurant critic Giles Coren, who hosted a regular “consumer report” strand during the show’s first run. In his place is the occasional feature by either Ramsay himself or his female equivalent, Janet Street-Porter. More Gordon or Janet = more swearing, since Coren was at least linguistically restrained. Mission accomplished, Channel 4.

The other big change was the removal of the first series’ competition in favour of an alternative “inspired” by Hell’s Kitchen. In the first series, a few enterprising junior chefs who wanted a job with Gordon Ramsay would show off their stuff by working in The F Word‘s kitchen. Each week, the chef would decide who would go on to the next round and in the final episode, the winner got the job after a bake-off. A nice idea, really, watching someone step up from a second tier job in attempt to break into the big leagues, triumphing only through their own skills.

This time round, Ramsay just gets to shout at non-chefs while they find out what life in a kitchen is like. Do we, as an audience, learn much from watching amateurs chefs with no experience of working in restaurant kitchens not manage to do as well as professional chefs? Do they really get anything out of it except a chance to be insulted? The whole strand is little more than an excuse for Gordon Ramsay to hurl verbal abuse at people for no good reason. Except since they’re amateurs and they’re not as good as the pros, he swears at them more since the one thing he really hates is food treated badly. Again, another tick for the Channel 4 swear box.

The rest of the show remains pretty much the same, just variations on the previous series’ themes at most. Gordon going round men’s houses to teach them how to cook Sunday lunch, instead of going round women’s houses. No more turkeys being reared for slaughter; hello pigs on the same journey. In their favour, these strands remain some of the better elements of the show. But there’s been nothing of equal or greater interest added in the same vein.

One part remains that is just cringeworthy, however. Whatever you think of Ramsay as a chef, one thing he’s not is a celebrity interviewer – he makes Davina look like Parkie. When faced with Cliff Richard, all he could was try to goad him into swearing. Either give him some training or let the celebrity interview him, Channel 4, because it’s just not pleasant to watch.

Nevertheless, despite the paucity of inspiration and the changes for the worse, ratings for the show have been good so far. In fact, this episode combined with Big Brother and Property Ladder, gave Channel 4 its second-highest rated night of the year so far. It seems swearing is indeed both grown-up and cool.

If there was one episode fanboys of old were looking forward to in the latest series of the BBC’s top-rated drama, it was “School Reunion”. Forget the return of the Cybermen. Forget the return of Graeme Harper, the best director the show has even seen. What everyone wanted to see was how everyone’s favourite Doctor Who companions from the ’70s would fare in the new series, and how reverently they’d be treated. With all those expectations loaded onto its back, it’s amazing that “School Reunion” just about did the job expected of it and with more depth than anyone could have expected.

As with all post-Buffy Who, there was an A-plot and a B-plot to “School Reunion”. The surprise is that the A-plot, normally reserved for the poorly CGI-ed monster of the week, was handed over to the Doctor and his companions’ emotional tussling.

Instead, it was the B-plot that had to deal with the shape-changing, flying bat things that wanted to rule the universe by solving an equation, a plot lifted either from modern particle physics’ attempts to develop a grand unified field theory or from some old Superman comics – it’s unclear which. To solve the equation, the bat things take over a school, install Anthony Stewart Head as the headmaster, then pump up the brainpower of the pupils by lacing their chips with an alien oil. So maybe not Superman but The Demon Headmaster then. Anyway, so far, so ridiculous.

Meanwhile, back in the adult A-plot, ace investigative reporter Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) was unceremoniously dumped back on Earth after happy years of companionhood with that wanderer in time and space known as the Doctor. 30 years later, spotting spaceships in the sky near a school of apparent geniuses, she decides to investigate, towing along her parting gift from the Doctor, a broken-down robot dog called K9. Mid-investigation, she comes across a mysterious stranger who appears to have stored an old-fashioned blue police box in the school gym …

For a script written by one of the least fanboyish of the current crop of writers, “School Reunion” is staggering in its concessions to the old series. While long-time fans Russell T Davies, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat have been doing their level best to avoid all continuity references, self-confessed Doctor Who ignoramus Toby Whithouse manages to sneak in references to just about every bit of K9 and Sarah Jane trivia imaginable. It’s a gamble, given how few of the current audience would have had even the faintest idea about who Sarah Jane and K9 were before the episode, but the script just about manages to explain everything necessary for the neophyte to cope with the backstory. It helps, of course, that the Beeb has been priming every well-behaved middle class kid with the necessary knowledge through guest appearances by Elisabeth Sladen and K9 on Blue Peter.

The meeting of old and new companions gives a chance for their stories and the Doctor’s to be explored, resulting in a surprisingly melancholy script. Nothing is given enormous depth, because there are bat-things to fight and only 45 minutes to do it in, but the plights of Rose and Sarah Jane, women who both travelled with a man who never ages, get examined in a way that’s never really been dealt with on the show before. The younger companion realises she’s not the first and probably won’t be the last woman who will ever share a TARDIS with the Doctor; the older companion realises that while she may have been special to the Doctor once, he’s moved on and barely mentions her.

This musing on the Doctor’s need for an endless stream of female companions, all of whom eventually must grow old and die, also gives David Tennant a chance to show his acting range in areas other than Prozac-quality cheeriness and anger. As if he hasn’t already done so in all his previous episodes, once again he effortlessly proves he’s a far better actor than the previous Doctor Who messiah, Christopher Eccleston.

Of the rest of cast and characters, Anthony Stewart Head is mostly wasted and bar a couple of homoerotic interactions with Tennant, is only really given opportunities to chew the scenery instead. Noel Clarke manages to get a handle on this “acting” thing at last and finally gets full TARDIS privileges. K9, complete with his original voice care of John Leeson, is used mostly as an object of fun; but it’s the “shooty dog thing” that eventually saves the day with a noble act of self-sacrifice that only the most heartless of viewers would have been unmoved by.

As Sarah Jane and the renovated K9 mark IV head off into the sunset again, finally having got the goodbyes they both deserved, a new generation of kids has been taught the nature of loss, death, age and mortality. It’s a brave children’s show that can do that. True, the plotting and effects are as ropey as last series, but the production team seem to have finally worked out the right balance between humour and gravitas, escapism and realism, sentimentality and banality.

Shed your tears for old Who because new Who is here and has finally found its way.

Part reality-TV car crash, part Big Boy’s Book of Business, The Apprentice is a television show many people end up loving without really understanding why. It’s not as if there are any likeable characters in it, after all. But as a civilised form of torture, it really can’t be beaten.

Ostensibly, its aim is to give the great British public an exciting insight into high-flying big business while simultaneously recruiting millionaire Sir Alan “Amstrad” Sugar a brand new, top-class minion to bend to his will.

That’s the theory. But there’s a slight gap between that and the show in practice. That gap is the contestants. Instead of the best and the brightest of British business, we mostly get a bunch of arrogant, lying, cheating, back-stabbing Wall Street wannabes who would fail hopelessly if ever Sir Alan set them a brewery-related task. If there’s a measure of the horror of the show, it’s the fact that Sugar is the most likeable character in it, apart from his trusty, but mostly silent lieutenants. Despite his bluster and abuse of the contestants each week, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the man, knowing he could well wind up with one of these incompetent vipers on his payroll.

We’re now nearly mid-way through the second series and thanks to the extensive pruning Sir Alan’s been performing over the previous weeks, the first green shoots of competence are starting to appear. Now gone are most of the really dead wood, who appeared to be hand-trained by gibbons in the delicate arts of business negotiation. Emerging instead are a few contestants who actually seem to have a clue. But not many.

This week’s mission for the two teams was to come up with an advertising campaign for Sir Alan’s new private jet credit card, Amsair. The card, as explained by Sir Alan, is ostensibly a really simple scheme: you can use it to charter private jets, wherever you are in the world, without all those thorny credit checks and negotiations we all face when ordering our own planes. Just dial a number and a Sir Alan’s lackeys will sort out all the details for you while you’re still sipping the champagne.

Unfortunately, this is where it all starts to go a bit pear-shaped. The teams send a couple of hapless candidates off to be briefed in full about the card by one of Sir Alan’s sons, the MD of Amsair. Velocity’s representatives, Ansell and Mani (a self-professed “world-class presenter” who nevertheless makes the average car-park watch salesman look sincere) eventually returns with the pitch that it’s “like a concierge service”. The rest of the team, led by Ruth, a reassuring island of competence in a sea of disaster but one with the charm of a granite cliff-face, naturally gets fooled into thinking the card is “like a concierge service”, even though it’s not. They then proceed with remarkable efficiency, cooperation and coordination to put together completely the wrong ad campaign.

Invicta, led by Paul, a third-generation Splendid Chap by the looks of him, escape this trap but can’t quite work out the best way to pitch the card, despite having an advertising lecturer in their ranks – “I only teach the theory of it,” Sharon explains later. Undeterred by failing to yet have that most vital component of any ad campaign – an idea – Invicta heads off to cast the actors for their 30-second promo video. They’re not sure who or what they want, so they test young, old, male, female, black, white and Asian alike, hoping that some compelling concept will land in their laps through the power of the casting pixies. The day ends, though, without any fairy dust having been sprinkled.

So, Paul puts his foot down, orders a midnight brainstorm, and, just like that, comes up with his pitch: “It’s like magic. 5000 airlines from one card”. It’s an idea so good, apparently, it gives team members “goosebumps just thinking about it.”

Day two then becomes a race against the clock to put together the video and a matching billboard. Both teams try to film on Sir Alan’s private jet at the same time, leading to a surprising moment of generosity by Splendid Chap Paul, when he allows the other lot to carry on shooting, even though he had the booking. It’ll be the last moment of generosity we’ll see from him this episode before he turns to the dark side.

In another further moment of synchronicity later that day, both teams simultaneously realise their directing inexperience has led them to accidentally shoot Confessions of a Business Traveller instead of a promotional video. Cue mad panic.

But with judicious editing and voiceovers, the worrying shots that make it look like the harried businessman in Invicta’s video was “rubbing himself off” are excised; and Velocity no longer have to worry about their concierge giving their businesswoman a look-over. The show can go on, after all.

But it’s about now that Mani, with remarkable timing, takes one look at his team’s campaign and points out that he meant the card was like a concierge service, not that it was a concierge service. Doom, gloom and more re-editing. Ruth, however, takes it all in her stride and to the surprise of regular viewers, so does bipolar Jo. She greets each new task with the eagerness of a Labrador puppy but then usually spends the allotted time complaining and crying. However here she is eager to stay quiet, knowing that if they fail, Ruth will tether her to a stake with all the other scapegoats, ready for firing.

The final hurdle before showing Sir Alan what his money’s bought him is a presentation to advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi’s entire creative team. After Ruth decides to bypass the sulking Mani in favour of the undervalued Samuel, Velocity deliver a blinder and are given the official blessing of Saatchi & Saatchi.

Invicta fares far worse. The world’s most important man, the self-styled “entrepreneur” Syed, is trying to keep a low profile. Syed, who confessed guiltily at the beginning of the programme that in the previous task he may have only given Sir Alan 110% rather than the 150% he’d previously claimed, is clearly feeling chastened and wants to be as blameless as possible in future. That leaves Paul to deliver the presentation. Unfortunately, Paul’s delivery of the worst jokes in presentation history only result in the contempt of the creatives for Invicta’s campaign. Suddenly, he realises he’s in deep trouble.

So come the final presentation of the campaigns to Sir Alan for his impatient evaluation, like all Splendid Chaps who think they are in deep trouble with the boss, Paul preemptively dumps on his entire team before the results are even announced. “I had to come up with the idea,” Paul grumpily explains. “I was expecting more of them. Especially Sharon.” The looks of his team mates could have killed and had Sir Alan not thrown Ruth’s lot to the lions instead, it’s likely they’d have done a lot more to Paul outside than just look at him.

But all is quickly forgiven, because Alan sends successful Invicta off for a champagne and fashion show treat, leaving Ruth to pick two other candidates from her squad for potential ejection from the building. After approximately a millisecond’s contemplation, Ruth nominates Mani and Jo for target practice.

Sir Alan’s not best pleased. He was speaking English when he’d explained what he wanted: did they have some problems understanding the language? No, Sir Alan.

So who’s to blame? At first, Ruth almost gets herself fired, when it becomes clear she’s brought Jo in because she doesn’t like her, rather than because of any terrible failing on the curly-haired, curly-brained one’s part. But it’s Mani, who has “gone from anchor to wanker” since the start of the series, Sir Alan decides, thanks to his overstated presentation skills being exposed in previous tasks as simple gobbiness.

To his credit, on the taxi ride home from Sir Alan’s offices, Mani gives an atypical Apprentice exit interview and instead of blaming everyone else, decides to face up to failure and get on with his life. Whether anyone will hire him after displaying his “talents” on-screen remains to be seen.

The remaining candidates walk off into the sunset, hoping to prove themselves in the next test. As a job interview it sucks and you have to wonder why management consultants and “entrepreneurs” among others would put themselves through it, just to be shouted at professionally by an easily irritated former market trader. But as a more genteel form of the village stocks, The Apprentice works just fine. A modern-day capitalistic morality play, it teaches aspiring Gordon Geckos that strutting around like a peacock won’t get you your business rewards in this life; only by sticking to the one true path of competence will you make your way to the sweet taste of Sugar heaven.

From the creator of Father Ted! From the producer of The Office! Occasionally guest starring Chris Morris! If the quality of Channel 4′s new sitcom, The IT Crowd, had purely been down to the pedigree of Graham Linehan, Ash Astalla and, indeed, Chris Morris, it would have been the show that emptied pubs on a Friday night. But something got lost between CV and screen, leaving us with a mysterious hybrid of both the best and worst parts of each contributor’s particular school of comedy.

As the punning title implies, The IT Crowd picks for its subjects the various misfits of an IT department. Roy (Chris O’Dowd) and Moss (Richard Ayoade) are the underclass at Reynholm Industries: while all the good-looking, high-flying other employees are out partying or enjoying their spectacular views of London’s skyline, Roy and Moss are down in the basement, being ignored, mistreated and generally abused.

Into their lives comes Jen (Katherine Parkinson), who despite claiming to know simply masses about computers is pretty much in the, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” school of tech support. What she does have, as Roy and Moss soon discover, is something worth far more than mere IT know how: she has social skills. Heading up the department as its new “Relationship Manager”, Jen tries to help Roy and Moss get lives and improve the department’s standing in the company – mainly as a way of extracting herself from the company dead zone into which she’s inadvertently wandered.

The IT Crowd is very much in the same style as Linehan’s previous work and it would be easy to draw up a list of similarities between the show and Father Ted, Black Books and even Hippies. Yet it isn’t just a simple retread of previous territory, with only the names changed. Roy and Moss are new and distinct Linehan characters, not just carbon copies of each other: Roy is an aimless drifter who looks down on the clueless employees who bother him with trivial problems, while Moss is a borderline-autistic mother’s boy who’d rather send an email to summon the fire brigade than pick up a phone to speak to another human being.

Linehan avoids the trap of simply mocking the two characters for being geeks, and instead makes them both sympathetic. Given that most viewers in real life are more likely to be on the side of the beautiful people rather than the IT department, it’s a reasonably brave decision, particularly when the show mocks the lack of IT savvy among those viewers.

Jen gets similarly thoughtful treatment. Linehan, clearly regretful about how much he under-used his female cast in shows such as Big Train, works overtime to ensure that she isn’t just a fallen angel: she has her own distinct line in problems, including the inveterate lying that landed her in the IT department in the first place. The show’s better plots – notably her shoe-shopping expedition – actually revolve around her rather than her underlings.

The most obvious line of continuity with previous shows is Linehan’s particular brand of silly and surreal humour, which can be both a blessing and a curse. But there are enough notes of authenticity in the depiction of office life to see Atalla’s influences as well. The show doesn’t hit the highs of The Office or even Are You Being Served?, but The IT Crowd‘s still no slouch at workplace observational comedy.

Of course, the big test for any sitcom is whether it makes you laugh. On that front, The IT Crowd needs more than a little work, with at least three episodes having a distinctly sub-average joke count and the others lagging in their middle sections. Mostly these joke deficits occur because of a lack of polish in the scripts and the frequent dead air left by the leads. The occasional veering away from the good-humoured Linehan school of comedy towards the cringing of The Office doesn’t help either. Yet even the worst couple of episodes have the occasional moments of genuine humour.

Of the regular cast, Chrises O’Dowd and Morris give the best performances, with Morris’s mercurial, variably-accented boss favourably recalling John Barron’s CJ in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Parkinson, while appealing at times, usually ends up shouting a little too much and in a strange, strangled manner that’s probably unique in British acting history; Ayoade’s performance lacks nuance, but isn’t so bad he undermines the show.

With ratings of 2.6 million per episode, The IT Crowd has inspired enough faith in Channel 4 for the network to give it an extended eight-episode second season. Given a little polish and a bit more discipline, the show could become the real Friday night draw C4 had originally intended, although its slightly divisive “them or us” quality will probably mean it never has the universal appeal of Father Ted. Whether Linehan and co have the ability to fix the bugs in the show remains to be seen.

TV shows about TV shows have a long, but not very distinguished history. There have been right-to-reply programmes like Points of View, Open Air and, erm, Right to Reply. There have been critical shows like Did You See? and Late Review. And there have been industry shows like Hard News and The Media Show. Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe attempts to roll all three genres into one with only minimal success.

Brooker, best-known for his now-defunct TV Go Home web site and his weekly Screen Burn column in The Guardian, has three main things going for him: He can be very funny and accurate in his analysis; he’s an industry insider, having written for The 11 O’Clock Show, created Nathan Barley and co-founded a production company, Zeppotron (which is now part of Endemol UK); and he lacks the pretension that many media commentators suffer from. Screen Wipe, which is essentially a TV version of Screen Burn, could therefore have been almost the Holy Grail of meta-TV shows – an accessible, entertaining look at television from both in front of the set and behind the scenes. Unfortunately, it has lofty ambitions yet only an elastic-band to power it.

In his favour, Brooker does lead the viewer on a merry path through the absurdities of much of modern television, particularly those on channels so high on the Sky EPG you get nose bleeds just going near them.

But Brooker, self-confessed rubbish presenter, seems to have the attention span of a gnat. Given a full half-hour to really get going on ridiculous text-message competitions designed to grab the viewer’s money, the lamentable nature of daytime TV and the dozen or so other topics he selected just for the first episode, he still produces more or less the same few hundred words he’d use in Screen Burn. A guide to “three great shows you shouldn’t miss” offers no reasons for you to watch those programmes, other than Brooker’s promise they’re good. Yet given his choice was The Shield, The Wire and Deadwood, anyone with even a passing familiarity with them could have waxed lyrical for most of the programme and at least have provided some insight.

Then there’s Brooker’s much-vaunted guide to the backside (ho ho) of the industry, which offers little. Exposing the fact that even his “low-budget” show costs £47k to make per episode, Brooker then spends five minutes or so explaining why. Which itself begs the question: “Why?”. Does the viewer end up in a better situation to understand the nature of television because of this segment? Does knowing it costs £50 to show a copyrighted photo on-screen help you analyse the current state of British drama production? Where are the critiques of the falling budgets that are squeezing post-production houses into bankruptcy, of the rise of the super-indie that’s leading to the demise of the small production company, or the effect that the amalgamation of the ITV franchises under the Carlton/Granada super-brand has had on creativity in the regions? Brooker is many things, but if this is his idea of an insider’s view of the industry, one thing he’s not is Ray Snoddy.

A bizarre interlude featuring Robert Popper of Look Around You adds another five-minute element to the mix: Z-list celebrity TV nostalgia, one of the things, ironically, that Brooker critiques endlessly in his Screen Burn column. Popper spends his allotted span enthusing on the awfulness of Gyles Brandreth’s 1980s talent/game show Star Quality. While this is indeed as bad as Popper recalls, the segment suffers from all the same flaws as other list shows: Popper obviously remembers the show, but can’t recall all the details after nearly 20 years, so a team of researchers have clearly stuck him in front of a single episode to refresh his memory. This, of course means almost all his comments end up hinging on that one particular edition. Again, it’s hard to see exactly what the point of the segment is, other than to add another element to the mix and to give Brooker five minutes off from the tiring job of presenting.

In an attempt to put together a one-size-fits-all show about television, Brooker has assembled too many elements into too short a time, a problem reflected unconsciously (or maybe even consciously) in the programme’s overall feel – a mishmash of disparate styles, ranging from reality TV, to list show, to late-night ITV video review programme. After watching Screen Wipe, you come away feeling as though you’ve been channel surfing for half an hour, rather than having watched The Media Show: The Next Generation.

While Brooker’s mixture of self-loathing and visceral hatred for bad television make for an entertaining read, they’re far less compelling on screen. Brooker needs to turn down that trademark self-deprecation and start taking himself seriously if he’s to be a TV presenter. He has many good points to make and a few of them hit home, but on the strength of this first episode, he really needs to take a dose of Ritalin and learn how to construct a proper argument if he’s to produce anything that lasts longer in the memory than a Kate Thornton retrospective.