Lord Reith was a Presbyterian Scot, a Wee Free wallah, among whose folks the most timid involvement in sensual pleasures had you hellbound. Strange, then, that perhaps the greatest living embodiment of Reith’s dictum “inform, entertain, educate” should be a bohemian epicure from Salisbury who extols indulgence in food and architecture.

Jonathan Meades’ new series from BBC Scotland (the irony!) looks very much like further confirming this stature, if the quite startlingly wonderful first-of-five, “Father to the Man”, is anything to go by.

Meades, thick-set and ambling in his suit and shades, was warmish property on TV at the turn of the 1990s – Abroad, Further Abroad, Even Further Abroad (you get the picture), he almost got the epithet “inimitable” in the listings – but since then has had to concentrate largely on hard-fought-for one-offs, cult offerings for the faithful. There was Joe Building and Jerry Building, or the iconoclastic mini-series Meades Eats, whose down-to-the-quick criticism of British food was buried in the schedules so as not to bugger with TV’s glamorising of our “cuisine”.

No bullshit; “Father to the Man” is time-capsule stuff. Magnificent – a good-looking but never glossified autobiography of the development of the author’s sense of place and “how mankind intervened” in the world the child Meades saw around him. It is also a dignified tribute to a late and missed father and “a land of lost content and Koola-Fruita”. An unsentimental salute to a provincial 1950s world of grocers who would sell that obsolete Maidenhead-manufactured ice-lolly and who would unashamedly sport “majestic comb-overs … British Racing Green coffee-roasters and maroon bacon slicers”.

Ricky Nelson and a pot-pourri of string-heavy British light music bandleaders put in appearances on the soundtrack, natch. The scent of Odense marzipan and eau-de-Cologne 4711 hangs heavy. Mmmm …

But period picturesqueness apart, “Father to the Man” concisely details the self-education of a “midget auto-didact” in the means by which humans create the world around them into what is now called the “built environment” – from vernacular architecture to water meadows to shack settlements to Fordson tractors. It makes for a spectacle that would be compelling, varied, funny, even if it were not couched in list-heavy, multi-claused language of a richness and complexity worthy of a good Calvados. No, this is one thing Ant and Dec won’t be doing to justify their salaries.

To say Meades is clever is to indolently miss the point. It’s like saying Zinedine Zidane is a good midfielder, or Boris Yeltsin liked a nightcap. He is also imaginative (further programmes are on garden cities, the evolution of British horticulture on the grand scale, the hypocrisies of the Garden Cities movement, the elision of branding and urban redevelopment). He is also, perforce, very persuasive (how does he get these things made?). The answer to that parenthetical question, by the way, is that he is very, very, very good.

His programmes are opinionated, bracingly prejudicial, but rigorously argued. If your brain blinks for an instant, you’ll miss it. The fact Meades and a small team of trusted directors manage to create such ravishing pictures, whose flow and rhythm are less redolent of British TV than Alain Resnais and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and allow the mind to remain engaged with Meades’ lecture – is a marvel of television. Not only of this, but any era.

Meades does not assume, as many inverted snobs mistakenly believe, that everyone knows as much as he does – ie. where Totton is, the date of the demolition of Netley Hospital, what leets are, the source of a Flaubert quote, why he refers to Betjeman as “the topographer, not the poet”. Thanks to the balance of image and text in his programmes, the sensuality of the visual – glaucous underwaterscapes, a splendid olive-green Morris 1000 estate, rostrum stills of Minibrix and Bayko – inspires a democratic and improving impulse to go and bloody well find out who and where and how and what and why. This programme makes cleverness, a hated bane of British life, seductive.

Reith would have loved it.

One review of a collection of Meades’s essays, Peter Knows What Dick Likes (Paladin, 1989) described its author as an enemy of “cultural yobbishness”. Meades is rather an enemy of received and obtuse unwisdom; of imagination and intellect stunted by orthodoxy. He is a natural, inoculant against tabloidism, that media creed which seeks to make of the commonplace a dictatorship of the familiar. In the hands of Meades and his cohorts, that which is unfamiliar in the commonplace becomes real and strange and beautiful.

“Your neighbours are the unknown stars,” wrote the Tour de France’s organiser Jacques Goddet in 1955, of the power of his race to exalt the reality of life for struggling rider and bewitched spectator alike. Here is ample proof – with sufficient application, we can all learn to find that fascination which resides in the apparently mundane.

There aren’t enough superlatives, even in Meades’ supersized vocab, to hurl at this, the programme of the year so far. If you don’t get this, chuck your telly out of the window.

Do you remember the future? I do. The future was called Harry Enfield, and his stock-in-trade was remembering the past.

Prodigal’s the word for it. Seven years ago Enfield took Sky’s shilling in a deal that produced a rubbish programme, and about which we still hear too little. Here was the liberal media’s populist hero giving suck to the Murdoch junta in the satellite channel’s biggest-ever talent coup, but why the programme was so poor and why its viewing figures so feeble neither Enfield, Sky or his former employers at the Beeb seem willing to even imagine. He effectively wrote himself off – not that he or his bank manager cared – as a relic of the early 1990s, like EMF, the Sunday Sport and Allison Holloway.

Enfield’s pomp coincided with the heyday of Viz, and both brands succeeded because of their ability to satirise that which was considered either taboo or simply humdrum. Viz, in its 1989-92 million-seller days, had unlikely targets such as Morris Day [Sexual Pervert], Biffa Bacon, The Fat Slags, Spawny Get and Spoilt Bastard. These succeeded because they were archetypes that nobody had ever satirised before and effectively played straight. The only weakness of Viz was John Fardell’s The Modern Parents, which failed because other genuinely gifted cartoonists like Harpur and Simmonds had ripped the piss out of the milieu before and done it much better. Perhaps the best Viz strip ever was the 1990 one-off Balsa Boy (“58-year-old social inadequate Arthur Trubshaw had always dreamed of having a son of his own …”), a study in pathetic loneliness so heartbreaking and simultaneously side-splitting it bears comparison with the best of Robert Crumb. It is the relentless everydayness of Viz’s storyboards that makes us laugh, the truffling of humour in the most routine of matters that is at once novel and familiar.

Ditto Enfield, who took his cue from Dick Emery but hard-pedalled the nuances of what made these characters work. The likes of Smashie and Nicey, the Lovely Wobbly Randy Old Ladies, Cholmondeley and Grayson, and the Scousers were funny simply because most people recognised the figures, triggering a mental resolution that underpins all humour, similar to the reaction to meeting an old friend in the street. They are part of our past, of most people’s pasts, private and public – the fact these characters had rarely been portrayed humorously before, if at all, and were written into often very amusing sketches just piled on the laughs. Around 1992 he was the hottest property in British comedy.

Enfield’s newie has him as the old friend – and it’s a pleasure to see him, and even more to see Whitehouse, who took the Enfieldian conceit into much darker and more unsentimental realms in The Fast Show, finally achieving equal billing.

It’s tempting to suggest that he is responsible for the more inspired moments of this – Nelson Mandela flogging alcopops and cheap beer is about 187,000 times funnier than it sounds. Portraying U2 as comedy Irishmen in a pub band is high-flying stuff, the class work of writers who can knock this out in their sleep, but perhaps the best moments don’t go to either Enfield or Whitehouse but the creation of two Polish shopgirls and the innate, imagined intimidation their customers feel upon encountering them. This is fine, strong TV light ent at its very best – taking the quotidian and giving it the tiniest and subtlest of tweaks. Tellingly, there are no catchphrases (although give it time) but the present writer still nearly wet himself with laughter.

Some sketches go all soufflé – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (one assumes) as Porky’s-esque nerds is bleeding-obvious meaningless (the old Modern Parents syndrome again). The Gates characters smack of plagiarism, so close are they to Rory Bremner’s Dick and Don juxtaposition of Beltway politics and crap youth viewing. I imagine this sounded as good in the pub as did Brokeback Mountain as done by Laurel and Hardy.

But this is what this programme felt like – a bibulous and joyful reunion of witty chums, and more power to its elbow. Mine’s another, if you’re going to the bar.

Dear Cathy and Claire, this is not an easy letter to write. I fancy this programme on TV and so want to write about it. Please help!!!! Yours, a confused boy.

Yes, I’ve a problem. And as the Hotspur and Shoot didn’t have agony aunts, far less the Beano, where else did a bumfluffed ado turn in the late 1970s? But boys didn’t have problems then. Girls did.

This documentary on the heyday of Messrs DC Thomson’s magazine Jackie was akin to wolfing down an entire box of Guylians. Comfort food, not too exclusive, can just manage it. Similarly this was comfort TV, intelligence without braininess. It could have been a mere collection of dullard talking heads. We got a few of them, but most of what they said made more sense than usual, and it said as much about the media as dopily evoking a lost world of training bras and Strawberry Shortcake and Robin Gibb and kissproofing.

There were glimpses of drably horrid emotional and material privation. One letter to Cathy and Claire – the magazine’s legendary agony aunts/big sisses – raged against parents who “couldn’t afford to buy a telephone”. Another contained a phial of urine, so desperate was the sender to sidestep the shame of teenage pregnancy. It was, as one staffer put it, “their only port in a storm”. One wants to weep.

The adolescent media preys on hormonal disturbance, on what Martin Amis once perceptively called, “Damp, adoring need”. Why else should this market still be an advertiser’s Holy Grail?

What was omitted was any opinion that Jackie’s take on adolescence was in any way a bad thing. The problem with adolescent media then as now was the sense, perceived only in later life, that they were de facto training manuals, enculturations. Shoot trained boys to read football as a linguistic prism, through which the world was one where people would blast or storm when upset. Headlines like “Billy Bremner – The Night I Had Murder On My Mind” prepared one for accepting a tabloid-mediatised cosmos. Nobody talks like that in real life; but using tabloid shorthand helps cretinize us into thinking they do, and thinking in similarly circumscribed ways. Similarly Jackie had its own constructions of language (“Dishy” was a favourite) and its own goals for its readers.

Some of the celebrity witnesses on this show (why celebs? The David Cassidy Fan Club, none of whose wattles were a day under 40, were much more fun) recounted the magazine’s obsession with propriety and marriage. Then there was the horoscopes. Pseudo-science: “If he has a square head, it means he wants to change the shape of the world” – absolute shit, and the people who made this up gleefully admitted as much. Is this the Frankie Frazer syndrome, where crimes committed 30+ years ago are absolved into larks by a time limit? This show made lively and convincing TV to persuade us that Jackie was a formative influence – Myskow, Carroll, Jacqueline Wilson, ex-Thomsonites all, significantly moved into the upper media echelons from Jackie. Shouldn’t these people be a little bit ashamed of what they did, what they made, and how what they made made of them?

Er … there was Myskow, former Jackie editor, sitting in state like the Queen of Hearts in retirement at Theydon Bois. At least she and Wilson, another ex-staffer, showed a trace of contrition and awareness of their deeds. Not so Sue Carroll, a colour that suggested not so much perma-tan as a Burmese army torturer with a blowlamp. She made George Hamilton look Finn-pale. God, she made fellow-contributor Trisha Goddard look pale.

Why else, save for terminal thickness or masterful manipulation, would the magazine’s target audience, and presumably that of this programme, take seriously the likes of the awful Michelle Collins? Or Fiona Bruce? Or shell out money on Closer? Who made them like this? Jackie did, sure as fortysomething slapheads, Clarksonites and members of Fathers4Justice still view the world through the crosshairs of Dredger and Hellman of Hammer Force.

The present writer’s theory is that many of the UK’s postwar ills can be laid at the scrubbed doorstep of DC Thomson, shapers of the world for untold millions of children. The comic arm of the Wee Frees, a dingy bastion of dingy Dundee, it was stridently and unapologetically illiberal, anti-union, provincial and small minded (abroad was a land of spies and whores where they said things like dratski and caramba!) mean and antediluvian in morals and thought-processes (so mean they used rubbish illustrators instead of photographers when it suited the company purse). If Adolf had won, it would have bid to produce an Anglophonic translation of Julius Streicher’s periodical Der Sturmer and the party organ Volkischer Beobachter. It was therefore ideally placed to bring to the tinies the virtues of thrift and chastity and prejudice, the lardy cake reality of make-do, pictured in Ivor Cutler’s Life in a Scottish Sitting Room which so underpinned British life post-45. How the Bash Street Kids snuck into this fortress is unknown.

The programme adopted a well-gauged tone, conceived by someone who had the magazine’s number. Conscientious but romantic, head in the sky, feet on the ground, you know the drill. But this post-fem indulgence of oppressive ideologies can only get you so far. What wasn’t given nearly enough space was the charge that Jackie was gynophobic from the off. Significantly, Thomsonite boss Gordon Small’s pinched Lowlands accent, more suited to the pulpit than the composing room, was the first one heard on the subject of sex. How many lives did DC Thomson’s photo-story ruin? This puritanical ostracism of hormonal drives contrasts bluntly with teen literature on the mainland of Europe (the excuse was, of course, that the Germans and Danes and French were all sex mad). But this absurd oversight fucked people over, genuinely, irrevocably, in ways that can’t be undone by a dollop of post-fem giggly irony about how watching the Chippendales can be empowering.

Props and research departments earned their corn, with plenty of feathers and stack heels (memo to producer – why no Wombles?). There was no Janet Street-Porter or Jenny Éclair, which must necessarily improve anything. There wasn’t the fetishisation of the past, making an object of it. Those are essentially male issues of control. The psyche of teenage girls was probed with less shallowness than one might have expected, but wasn’t that depth part of what it meant to be female and young back then? It’s what attracted the boys – me, anyway. Girls didn’t bother with contingent and pointless things, like identifying the green double-decker in one marvellous piece of archive as AN11, a London Country Leyland Atlantean PDR1/1A of Stevenage garage (depot code; SV). The disdain of such nonsense is what made girls special. This is what they were never told made them special.

Sad, then, to see insight not extending to a comparative study of what made girls and boys different, and also how those differences were reinforced by the discourse of their reading matter. The presence of Trevor and Simon as spokesmen for blokes was a poor move, albeit one which performed the minor service of proving that these two saddos seem to have achieved the major feat of being even less funny than they were in their Saturday Superstore “pomp”.

Like its intended constituency, this had not a supermodel’s allure, and neither did it wear bottle-bottom NHS bins. It got it right, most of the time. It kept its hand on its penny, as mums would have said back in the mag’s youth. In sum, rewarding and deserving workaday TV, of which there is too little of any quality at all.

One other thing, though. If I remember rightly, it wasn’t just Donny vs David; Michael Jackson was in the fantasy mix, too, wasn’t he? Or is this me being insufferably boyish?

Dear Cathy and Claire, there’s this boy who’s really nice, but he ain’t half picky …

Evidently not 16th century London, as per the producer’s wishes with costly sets of wattle-and-daub, numerous bubo-flecked extras (shit-shovellers, doxies, courtiers and damsels all a-simper). No – we were in a BBC focus group circa 2005, and a very obtuse one, if this worryingly ropey fare is anything to go by (even right down to the bubo-flecked extras, but let that pass).

It has become a commonplace, going on a social obligation, to expound as much uncritical admiration for the 21st century Doctor Who as it was mandatory to diss his so-last-millennium predecessors. Watching some of the 2006 series, that situation seemed reasonable. Only a fool would deny that the resurrection of the Doctor in 2005 was anything but a fair-sized triumph, but the small qualifications attached to that honour have now grown like Topsy, rather like the disproportionate cultural space allotted to a programme believing its own hype, losing the plot and taking its besotted audience with it.

The premise of this episode – a return to 1599 to save the world from a triumvirate of warty-conked witches from outer space, the Carrionites, and to explain the disappearance from history of a lost Shakespeare masterpiece, Love’s Labour’s Won. The Globe Theatre, see, with its mystically-influenced tetradecagonal design, is to serve as sort of malevolent orgone accumulator of Carrionitic evil summoned by the power of words. Enter Will Shakespeare, stage right. The episode is well-paced, slickly continuing the programme’s newfound penchant for self-contained one-off adventures. So far, so engaging.

But time travel rendered as any kind of prose or screenplay invites even more than all other texts and by its very nature the danger of anachronism, as the word itself implies. There are relative levels of same, of course. Here; yes, Bedlam hospital appeared to be an edifice of very late Jacobean design and therefore unlikely to have been around in 1599. Would Shakespeare have had a Warwickshire accent? This is hair-splitting, like that of those people who yell at the TV when locomotives and rolling stock and buses from the “wrong” period or “wrong” region or (I’m not making this up) “wrong” depot crop up in costume dramas like Miss Marple. Doesn’t matter. Let it go.

But the subplot of the Swan of Avon getting the hots for Martha and addressing one of his most famous sonnets to her was so berkish and improbable that it made me hide behind the sofa for the first time since I saw “Planet of the Spiders” (or was it England vs Andorra?). And there’s another problem with the new Doctor; its principal anachronism is of the most annoying kind, ie that of needless affectation to court approval. It doesn’t just holler its contemporariness, its uses 70,000 watt Marshall stacks to do so. Worse, that horrible non-word “inclusiveness” has become one of the series’ mottos and threatens to become as big a downer as the original’s rubbish sets and wooden performances.

This is the reason for first Rose’s and now Martha’s self-consciously estuarial speech patterns, with the obligatory payload of defensive, shopgirly chaff. If sci-fi always discloses more about the time in which its stories were written than the timeframes of their setting, future generations will look on the 21st century Doctor less as a TV classic than a slightly embarrassing timeslip into imagined hipness.

Witness the subsidiary characters. Whereas a convincing emotional three-dimensionality eventually informed Billie Piper’s Rose, this was too often built on the motivations and linguistic devices of soap. As for Martha, her successor, it’s hard to imagine a more obvious example of character-design by committee in Blairite Britain; conveniently mixed ethnicity, successful, feisty, has smarts and street sass in equal measure, yet also a “feminine side”™. How many constituencies can one programme suck up to? And, incidentally, why, if she’s so bright – and a doctor to boot – has she never at least heard of Bedlam?

I may be mistaken but I think that at one point, Martha actually uttered that soap staple, “I don’t believe I’m hearing this”. Or possibly it was, “This is so not happening”. Or whatever (or “whatever”). It’s true that most usages in Shakespeare’s time weren’t exactly as refined or waspish of those of Beatrice and Benedick, but this is taking things a bit far. It is the equivalent of Jamie repeatedly telling the Doctor that the Cybermen, “Are just like on a real uptight trip, man”, or Leela chanting, “Women reclaim the night” every two minutes or Ace having an obsessive crush on so-lush Rick Astley.

Unless writer Gareth Roberts was dazzling us with doublethink and double-bluff, this episode, ostensibly about the transfiguring power of linguistic genius, seemed mostly about contemporary lexical poverty. Detail errors in 1599 costumes and props are tolerable – but when you base a script around words saving humanity and then have to fill the mouths of late Elizabethans with the demotic of dumbed-down telly, you’re in trouble.

The irony was strained to a point where one wondered if the fabric of the space-time continuum would hold. As the Doctor and Martha march into his actorly sodality, Will talks about “not signing autographs” and “don’t ask me where I get my ideas from”. Allusions to Harry bloody Potter really are the thin end of the postmodernism-for-kids wedge. But that’s OK, as long as “everyone” has something to “identify” with, as long as everyone “gets it”, thus aping the wildlife unit’s idiotic habit of reducing the behaviour of colonies of termites or meerkats or nematodes to the dimensions of a Neighbours plot strand.

The problem is that, as per most things on TV these days, producers will never accept the old saw that a little goes a long way, from sly anachronistic irony to inclusiveness to laboured laffs. A sundry, “Let’s not go there” or temporally-skewed nod to The Weakest Link is fine; chucking it in an audience’s face isn’t. David Tennant’s M.O. suggests he understands this perfectly, and his enjoyable penchant for askance raised-eyebrowing and instinctive timing renders a poor joke superfluous – such as the playwright saying, “I might use that,” when the Doctor quotes a line from a yet-unwritten Shakespearean opus (using this mundane riff three times was plain shoddy). Just as humdrum was the use of other heavy-handed insertions, “The play’s the thing” etc.

Roberts’ occult references were promising, as in the idea of annihilating a self by uttering his/her/its name – fair’s fair, the use of magic “taboo words” to which JG Frazer refers in The Golden Bough tied in loosely with the concept of the power of language to create and destroy, but something seemed missing, unfinished, rushed. There were the usual vague Lovecraftian notions of inconceivably Ancient Ones. There were three witches – Shakespeare, Lear, that hubble-bubbling ho Atropos and her homiez, geddit? But this conceit seemed either to flatter people who’d done Eng Lit O-level or merely as a prompt for GCSE students who were nicking off revision for the evening.

Thus does the BBC fulfil its educational remit, one imagines. There was, nonetheless, one quite neat line which subverts the popular belief that “rage, rage against the dying of the light” is Shakespeare’s (sorry, Dylan, but that’s how it’s going to be. I always get it wrong, too).

To play and lose this kind of dangerous game with words and text smacks of unfortunate sorcery itself and looks like carelessness – but then to invoke the history-altering power of language and dramatic genius as a plot device looks like carelessness. See how easy it is to just wolf down some other writer’s leavings for effect?

Of course the special effects are electrifying. Of course it’s made by people who don’t think that what they’re making is pathologically inferior, which so diminished the original Doctor Who. Of course it’s all fun for the kids. So why come on to adults with what imagines itself to be clever wordplay? And no, The Simpsons and its brand of split-level referentiality is the wrong – and very disingenuous – answer. If you’re going to woo the grown-ups with kiddie shows, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong in doing so, just do it better, and cobblers to political correctness. Those other cartoonish crossover icons Wallace and Gromit don’t work their magic by being inclusive, or at least not self-consciously so, after all. Dangermouse and Penfold would know what I mean, as would Eric Thompson.

Unless things pick up pronto, the superb Tennant will deserve not so much a BAFTA as an OBE for coming out of this looking so good (is it too late for him to run against Gordon Brown?). Originally pitching at an uneasy amalgam of eccentrics Baker and Troughton – especially the moonstruck, vaguely Edwardian mannerisms of the latter, with a fine handle on blurring the line between wondering effusiveness and incalculably aged wisdom – he has become not just unarguably the best Doctor ever, but, given scripts of waning force, one of the finest performers on British television. Nonetheless, inane audience targeting, that bane of TV, may yet let him down.

Ah, what do I know? The spin-offs will gather pace. What price a 13-week talent show (where you vote! Text us now …) to find the new Doctor? The Hairy Bikers On Skaro (we wish); Soapstar Time Lord? Bet against none of them. The Whovian bacillus that has so smartly body-snatched London’s meejah thirtysomethings will be a willing parasite as they graduate to positions of power, its lifeblood every last penny of millions of innocent licence-payers. Calamity looms … unless a Time Lord – or, more prosaically, some production values that don’t pander to the witlessness of bored post-adolescents can save the day.

Remember comedy as the new rock’n'roll? Well, maybe it’s now the new new rock’n'roll. Ricky Gervais is selling out the Albert Hall and Hammersmith Odeon (not the Hammersmith Apollo, please). Catherine Tate appears on Comic Relief with the PM. And for the 50th anniversary of one of the BBC’s most enduring (and enduringly endearing) programmes, Jon Culshaw from Dead Ringers plays a starring role.

Sir Patrick Moore is now 84, and if this is anything to go by, age is withering his critical faculties. This is the man who, in the course of the show, we saw played as younger self on 1957′s premier broadcast (the tape has been wiped, another BBC oversight which Moore seemed to approach with remarkable sanguinity). Back then he had the good taste to decree that You Are My Lucky Star, the rinky-dinky light music theme tune to the new show (originally to be called Star Map) was replaced by the grave tones of At the Castle Gate from Sibelius’s incidental music to Pelléas and Mélisande. What the young Moore would certainly not have said, although Culshaw did was, “What we need is a piece of stark Scandinavian introspection”. As well as the phrase’s meaninglessness, its usage was anachronistically flippant and in any case Sibelius’s homeland of Finland is not in Scandinavia and the music was written for a play by a Belgian author. Stupid. Just stupid.

Nit-picking? Maybe. But The Sky at Night has always been a show that prided itself on an avoidance of the overtly frivolous and above all the lazy. Some of this was less lazy than narcoleptic. If Moore had lived off a diet of fare as insipid and thin as this, he would probably be several stones lighter.

In fact, his bulk now resembles one of those overblown stately homes of England that has fallen into frayed disrepair, a behemoth of memories, spilled port, mountainous breakfasts and schoolmasterly vowels. One may decry his reactionary politics, but the man is no fool, and always seems to have insisted on a degree of intellectual rigour singularly lacking here. Against that, the very simplicity of The Sky at Night – often bordering on the cheapskate – made it progressively more unusual on British TV as the years passed. It was never really a great programme – as Moore was never really a great broadcaster – but life, and the TV would be infinitely emptier without it, or him.

The very premise of the 50th birthday show – that a “time machine” would allow us to see back to that 1957 BBC studio with its button-down staffers, and into the future of 2057 – was dodgy, suggesting how uneasily science and trivia sit together.But why bother in the first place? Moore’s own irascible eccentricity has always provided the show with enough of an offbeat accent to render panto treatments superfluous. Culshaw was efficient as ever, and also had as few funny lines as ever. What was presumably meant to be the show-stealer – an interview with Dr Brian May (yes, that one) on a Mars base 50 years hence was similarly incoherent. By my reckoning, by 2057 May would be celebrating his 105th birthday, but looked remarkably like his present-day self after a quick snowjob of his famous frightwig. There were lame gags about anachronisms – “President Bruce Willis” had proposed “nuking” a rogue meteorite in 2041 (when Willis would probably be far into his 80s).

May was actually quite good but his only serviceable line was an in-joke for Queen fans or rock saddos (yeah, that’s me) – a holographic Moore (done with chromakey that looked more 1977 than 2057) presented him with a “one million pound coin” (don’t ask) which May promised to use as a plectrum, referring to the guitarist’s habit of relying on obsolete coinage to rip out his solos. But there was the inevitable reference to May’s infamous Buckingham Palace performance in 2002 which now seems to be a contractual stipulation for all of his publlic broadcast appearances (I have always found this perverse, like David Bowie enshrining his legacy as The Laughing Gnome).

The Sky at Night was of course born at a time of boundless optimism about space, of wonderment at its possibilities, when it was envisaged through the Dan Dare comic strips of Frank Hampson. One of the more engaging episodes of this anniversary edition had predictions from Culshaw/Young Moore robustly rebuffed by his contemporary alter ego. But there has always been the susurrus of to-infinity-and-beyond about Moore, evidenced by the thematic centrality of time travel (it was a minor miracle that there wasn’t a plug for Doctor Who, which must make it unique among BBC broadcasts of the last fortnight); “intelligent life forms” of a lower order, it is promised, will turn up on the Jupiter moon Europa a half-century from now. Quite what the notoriously Europhobic Moore made of that we never discovered.

Whether the future for space exploration is a rosy one remains moot, a topic which a better edition of this venerable show might have treated well. But if Moore’s beloved Sky at Night continues in this orbit, he might want to temper his optimism about more earthly matters.

But back in the ’70s I was rubbish at maths and it hobbles you watching this show. It’s maybe caused me to lose count of the number of arbitrary, wilful and downright bloody annoying jump-cuts in what was otherwise a perfectly reasonable endeavour. It might have been 142,737 – can’t remember.

Curtis’s shtick, from the get-go of this curate’s egg of a curate’s egg, has been maths. Maths, maths and more maths.

This is a subject which, one fears, has never quite been quite as big a TV crowd-puller as, say, Jordan’s breasts. I find this a constant. Maths was never a hit in my school either; but if you compared Mrs Stokes the mathematician to Mlle Aillaud the French mistress, you could see why the class of ’79 produced a lot of linguists.

But then again Curtis is above such triviality – his argument is of a didactic, sit-up-and-take-notes complexity that demands exposition over three episodes of prime-time BBC2. And it’s a muscular one of admirable loftiness that defies easy summarising save in its extant form.

It goes like this: post-Cold War Western democracy has been governed by market-friendly notions of humans as genetically pre-programmed machines of self-interest, paradigms of the pleasure principle, thereby surreptitiously enslaving us all to the whims of the economy under the guise of pursuing the goals of self-betterment and development which the “winning” of the Cold War were supposed to make a reality. Smart, eh?

This proposal has a firm logical base, but requires an exposition of spectacular intellectua élan, and extensive scientific testing. It gets neither, although Curtis may not be culpable. As his films indicate, the world in which we live is an increasingly complex matrix of discourses, a sphere in which time and money coalesce. To see through his argument, Curtis might well need the resources and time slots available in days of yore to, say, Bronowski or Clark. The fact that Curtis has got three hour-long slots is worthy of celebration in itself. Quite a feat; after all, this was three hours of BBC airtime that could have been given over to cross-country running or something featuring Ben Fogle.

Curtis’s liberal credentials emerged more plainly in this second episode, but given the timescale he deals with, the bulk of talking heads, whether living or talking from the grave of the archive, are usually libertarians, Friedmanite freaks, laissez-faire nutjobs. Napoleon Chagnon, an “anthropologist” who became famous for his footage of the Amazonian Yanomanis in the 1970s, had a boozer’s conk as pitted as the moon. When asked if he’s sure about a proposal, responds, “Are you sure your father’s your father?” before struggling to his feet and waddling offset in a tizz. In a way, it was a shame that more rational voices of the centre-right of philosophy weren’t heard, like the Hungarian maverick Tibor Liska – but slowly Curtis’s logic emerged. The libertarians blethered away, while anyone with a brain asked the questions and got ready with the remote control’s “off” button.

Markets could define human happiness better than politicians, ignoring entirely the possibility that economy is itself a political phenomenon. Er … right. Solutions could be found “not through politics” but by the market, by “the objective power of numbers”. This was inadequately rationalised, but you knew the strands of “thought” Curtis was reporting on. Most damningly for the right-wingers, he brought in their catastrophically oft-quoted 18th and 19th century thinkers who identified the market as the main agency of human interaction, unwittingly pre-echoing Karl Marx’s entire worldview.

Curtis then twisted his knife; the mathematical rationalisation of human behaviour, he claimed, could be traced down through every level of British society. Like an 18th-century pamphleteer, his trail of logic went on and on. The victory of behaviourism over psychiatry in the 1990s, in which the cure rather than the cause of mental illness brought a new economic and social pragmatism to psychiatry was the tip of the iceberg. The development by the pharmaceutical industry of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibtors (SSRIs) like Prozac, were tools to reconfigure the human machine for its reintegration into the market machine.

The obsession with numbers, Curtis persisted, drove New Labour obsessions with targets and performance, and with no default mode to offset failures in the mathematical mode of calculation, tbe problems (poverty, crime, health service defects, Kilroy at large in society) simply got worse. This entire conceit was, of course, logically untenable (Curtis made no mention, with admirable ironic restraint, of the lack of targets applicable to Blair’s own performance record as PM).

To the present writer, Curtis’ closely-argued thesis is sympathetic but not compelling. The fact that his historical interpretation is allowed to be the only counterblast to libertarian, free-market orthodoxy without resort to the arguments of postwar Marxist thinkers betrays either vanity, ignorance or skimpy production values – or all three. The likes of Marcuse, Horkheimer and others have been before the cameras as have Hayek and Popper. There were editorial flubs, again possibly engendered by lack of airtime – episode two catalogued the handover of fiduciary muscle by the Clinton and Blair administrations to the Fed and Bank of England in 1993 and 1997 respectively, and yet within half an hour claimed that politicians were “without power to change society”. There are jerky and historical switches between Whitehall soundbites and Beltway bribes. Why? Messy, messy, messy.

Worst of all, from TV’s point of view, is that a programme which attempts to expose a deep and abiding cancer in the way our rulers see, and thereby shape, the world should be couched in a visual language that so echoed the postmodern, unregulated universe that they apparently endorse. The metareality of endless consumer choice is symbolised as the all-too-real endless range of image. Curtis and his directors employed techniques had the rat-tat-tat modishness of corporate online and telly advertising. It doesn’t preclude moments of quiet brilliance – for instance, the smiley emoticons on a police computer screen to denote a crime-solving target met. But if Curtis’s visual imagination is an ironic gesture, it is wanting, and is taken to extremes of length.

In so embracing TV’s visual immediacy and vibrancy, Curtis perhaps ignores TV’s own role in the processes which have shaped a society he so clearly, and rightly, abhors. There must be a better way than this. Let’s just be thankful that even this eye-wearying stuff is at least being shown, and hope that by the concluding episode three, Curtis and his crew contrive a calculus between text and image that makes this into the modern TV milestone it wishes to be.

The British – unlike the peoples of most civilised mainland European nations and through the historical accident of the Industrial Revolution – lost most of their congenital links with the land nearly 200 years ago and have very little idea of what it is for, aside of picturesque adornment or a regular source of edible ordure, some “meat” and two “veg”. Compare this with most Germans, French, Italians or Spaniards, who can still taste the soil in the sap of their family trees, and whose dietary preferences reflect this.

Time was that Country File was a fuck-you mantra, the weekly propaganda bulletin of the National Farmers Union; a whinge against Bruxellois diktat so predictable that you could set your seasonal clock to it. Why can’t we feed cows the slurry from Norwegian drake abattoirs? Why can’t we plough up SSIs? Why are professional pains in the arse allowed to protest against our generational crimes against the British palate and animal welfare we’ve committed since the Enclosure Acts?

No more. There’s precious little about fistulous withers, John Deere injector valves, sarcoptic mange mites or set-aside on Sunday mornings any more. Despite the holdover of the forensically exact “Farmer’s Forecast”, which offers the coming week’s weather with a scientific juxtaposition of honesty and exactitude that shames mainstream bulletins, and with none of the accompanying care-and-share hand ballet, things are changing. Farmer Palmer, you are the weakest link. Now geddorff moy laaand!

Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Well, to conurbial media types, yes, which proves just how wrong the British get the country. Country File‘s makeover is not necessarily a good thing. The programme’s 21st century cru is like the Toy Town revamp of the OS’ 1:50000 maps, in which the countryside is rendered as a colour-coded, pictogrammaticised leisure amenity of picnic-site and viewpoint and public bog.

And with a surge in be-greened Islingtonians demanding news of how to live ethically, the right-to-roam, promiscuously-anarchistic ethos which has defaced our imagined triangulation (with the best of intentions) is now overtaking the only widely available show to deal with non-urban issues. With Michaela Strachan whooping just that tiny bit too much in various leisure and lifestyle features, things don’t look good. So how is the makeover going?

Country File‘s brief is quite a responsibility and it must be said that the early-rising, shitty-fingernailed clodhoppers, from Dungeness shrimpers to Radnorshire post-bus drivers shouldn’t fret too much. This is a confident little show inhabiting its own niche with the cockiness of a cuckoo, doing pretty well, but, as with most rural phenomena, needs to be watched and scrutinised closely for it to yield its best results. British TV, always London-centric, still has an overwhelmingly metropolitan and urban bias in terms if output which far outstrips the demographic dichotomy between urbes and rures.

British TV has always regarded the great outdoors as a bit freaky, one for exotic naturalists, shouty-scouty types and excitable youngsters (interestingly, John Craven, Juliet Morris, Diane-Louise Jordan, CBBC veterans all, are now Country File stalwarts). Matters of cultural identity are at stake out there in carrot-cruncher land, but you’d never know it if you watch TV. From the Tolpuddle Martyrs to the Peasants’ Revolt to Wensleydale cheese cooperatives, these things make us up, who we are as much as the trials and travails of Wayne and Colleen. Similarly, depopulation, factory farming, the artificial deformation of countryside transport infrastructure from Beeching’s mid-60s rail closures onward are matters of major concern to anyone interested in the evolution of society.

On this particular Sunday, Craven was in the Fens. Aside of a fairly pointless few minutes on Ely Cathedral, we had a nicely-turned snatch of eel-trapping on the Great Ouse, a barmy Scouser bathing in the freezing surf off the Wirral’s wilder western dunes, a thoughtful little lens into the factory farming of chickens, and – oh dear – Michaela yelping her way along the A35 through the New Forest. This was one of Country File‘s less auspicious episodes; at its best, it gently belittles agribusiness, files a living library of dying dialects and ailing accents from Suffolk to Ceredigion. It emphasizes occlusion, difference; TV’s view of Britain is that seen from, or immediately accessible by, motorway, be it social habit, demography or culture, the 21st century as dictated by what can be bought in a Welcome Break service area (look at Abinger Hammer or Granchester or Penrith these days). Country File‘s remit is to forage over the boondocks.

There is, admirably, little time for “inclusivity” – Country File‘s producers don’t seem to adhere to a quota-driven pretence, to make the show more appealing to the young, to gays, to Asians, or to young gay Asians, to unipedal single mums etc. The palpable absence of a focus group on the editorial is as bracing as the Cambridgeshire sky towering above Craven’s head. There have been sensible and undemonstrative features on “immigrants” and “outsiders” in rural communities. That’s all – Country File has not yet been asked to remove to the pretend, infantilist world of Balamory, where all and sundry’s differences, essentially urban, are miraculously meliorised.

One of Farmer Palmer’s favourite sayings was that “yon townees dun understand the woys of the cundrysoide”. Actually, what Country File is grasping towards is a social shift in thinking and demographic (housebuilding, ecophilia) which suggests that this may be set to change. For better? For worse? The programme doesn’t say – but that such issues still arise on terrestrial TV and are discussed rationally is a matter for some encouragement.

When Country File gets it right, it vaguely summarises what prime-time BBC2 used to do best; a 40 Minutes on a Dean Forest herder and his inbred ilk, a conductor on the Ravenglass and Eskdale railway in his final year of service, or hairy-arsed 18-wheeler pilots charged with taking the 160,000 bird-flu turkey carcases from Bernard Matthews to their fiery grave. On today’s edition, there was nothing of the Fens’ jealously-guarded reputation as the stock-car and line-dance capital of the UK. The scandal of Morecambe Bay and the fate of poor immigrant cocklers wasn’t flinched from, and the only farmers allowed to beef these days are ones in genuine need, the put-upon hill-herders of the Celtic fringe, but still too little attention is paid to the national outrage of piffling agricultural wages.

There is a tendency to retread the 1930s advertising vernacular on the countryside as a playground, commoditised as leaflet and poster. Strachan’s fluff, like her leisurely spin in a blue BMW Mini and the flabby Liverpudlian pinkly fresh in the sunrise suggests that the prognosis is troubling. There’s nothing about property prices in Stow-on-the-Wold yet, but features on pest control among the national cattle herd and the passage of various parliamentary green and white papers that affect thousands from shepherds to sub-postmistresses are dwindling from the programme. There is not remotely enough on the threat to Green Belt land. But it’s not all bleak – there seems to be a birder tendency within the production team which pushes features on marshland habitats. And rightly so. Just because some nutcases wield shotguns and burn pallets and vote UKIP is no reason to either damn an entire demographic, in the same way as that a dreamt-of smallholding is any reason to idealise it.

Country File is managing to reflect this diversity. Just about. Like spring sunshine, make the most of it while it lasts.

It’s always the problem. Undertakings like this tend to attract nitpickers. Programme makers get all huffy – “We give them what they want and it’s moan, moan, moan”. Why?

Simple. Because these excursions are so rare that they discourage critical evaluation. Time was, when a classical concert, a ballet, or an opera appeared roughly once a month, comparative judgements were possible. If Kempff threw up into his piano at the start of Schubert’s Wanderer fantasy or Callas farted during Lucia di Lammermoor’s mad scene, we’d switch off and wait to see how Brendel or Schwarzkopf would cope, much as a particularly choosy rock fan would turn off The Old Grey Whistle Test if it wasn’t up to scratch or if Poco were on. There’d always be something different next week. Now, even with the proliferation of DVD performances for a monied audience, lovers of serious music will lap up anything on terrestrial. It’s an event; a confirmation that such people still exist as TV consumers like any others, and that’s a serious need fulfilled. But the rarer these fulfilments become, the harder the task of the newer event to live up to the older.

And no event is quite like Wagner’s Ring. I refer not to its bloated 900-minute length, astounding psychological and theatrical depth, intellectual rigour (and often, jaw-dropping silliness) but to its peculiar and singular televisual heritage. It was, after all, the subject of what was not only the greatest telecast of any operatic endeavour but a milestone in broadcasting any kind of theatrical production.

In 1980 the Eurovision director and classical/opera specialist Brian Large approached Wolfgang Wagner, the master’s younger grandson, with a view to telecasting the “centenary” production of the Ring first staged in 1976 at its original home, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Originally a succès de scandale, complete with post-curtain fistfights with steins and cudgels and the whole paraphernalia, it became a legend in the marriage of theatrical and operatic practises and performance. By 1980, the production had been perfected, the cast and conductor (Pierre Boulez) in perfect harmony. Stage director Patrice Chéreau’s conception, basing the epic’s action in a vaguely neo-Marxist re-imagining of Wagner’s own 19th century milieu, had not been intended for TV but thanks to Bayerischen-Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio and TV) and Large’s directorial genius, the result was a visual and dramatic triumph, playing the enormous Bayreuth stage and its endless sonic and visual possibilities for all they were worth. Chéreau had not conceived his production with TV specifically in mind, although a project was in the wind – in any case the result was, televisually, a triumph of serendipity, transforming one of the most heavy-handed works of art in western culture into an often gripping small-screen potboiler.

The BBC broadcast it as a soap, act by act, in autumn 1982, and then again in spring 1985, as a properly quadripartite epic, drama by drama. Chéreau’s anachronism hardly counted; it was compelling telly. Heinz Zednik’s turns as the crafty god Loge and the hapless dwarf Mime, Donald McIntyre’s tragic gravitas as Wotan, the lord of the gods, and the incandescent sexual chemistry between Jeannine Altmeyer (Sieglinde) and Peter Hofmann (her brother Siegmund) in Act 1 of Die Walküre was simply unmissable. Even given the fuggy video stock of the time, the impact of these sensational recordings is still second to none.

Bayrischen-Rundfunk made a telecast of a 1987 Munich recording at the Bayrischen Staatsoper; a space-age set, moronically duff symbolism, wooden characterisation and characteristically dull conducting by Wolfgang Sawallisch let the whole down. Only then did it become obvious how astonishing the Bayreuth experiment had been. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s employment of Large as head honcho behind a video recording of their 1988-90 Ring, acclaimed on CD, was cut, it seemed, largely through curtains of olive-green gingham. James Levine’s faithful conducting and some great performances, notably Hildegard Behrens as Brünnhilde, didn’t mean this was any more watchable.

There have been others since; but none have made it to British terrestrial TV.

Covent Garden’s was a less than stimulating production and makes for less than stimulating TV, despite the fact that conductor Antonio Pappano displays a mature and compelling reading of the Götterdämmerung score that puts many older men to shame and that the playing of the Covent Garden orchestra has been exemplary throughout the Ring tetralogy. This is no place to dwell on Warner’s inchoate abstractions which drew so much righteous fire from London’s critics. But Warner’s concern, as per most directors since World War II is to emphasise the human relationships and intimacies between Wagner’s characters, which he has done by inserting them into dark, claustrophobic sets. The BBC responds by framing them narrowly, singly or doubly. This of course may be to “humanise” and further soapify them – Large had, however, already used camera angles and lighting to establish humanistic tensions in 1980, and did it 50 times better.

After the Bayreuth Festival reopened in 1951, Wieland Wagner, the composer’s elder grandson, was credited with demythologising the operas by playing them out as Greek tragedy in huge blank spaces, subtly coloured with lighting, making the stage a psychological blank, like a Rorschach blot. The grandeur was still there; but now, humanising essentially superhuman characters has become claustrophobia, post-modernism, reductio ad absurdum.

There is also the underlying notion that reality becomes constrained by TV and the mass media. In opera and the theatre this tedious notion is now about 40 years old, and can’t really be allowed to go on much longer. One cannot arbitrarily minimise the impact – macro or micro, within the drama or as a whole – of Waltraute and Brünnhilde’s dialogue. One Valkyrie trying to persuade another to alter the course of history doesn’t really work as a kitchen sink drama. Again, Large solved this problem wonderfully by subtle use of middle-distance shooting in 1980. Thank God, then, for the singing and playing – John Treveleyan’s croaky Siegfried aside – are sublime, however, and the whole was presumably legitimised by the presence of the inestimable Wagner scholar John Deathridge taking a talking head role in the intervals.

Warner’s approach also had the unfortunate effect of amplifying Warner’s conceits, such as in the same Act 1 of Götterdämmerung, where we get a close up of a drugged Siegfried blabbing about whether he can read “güte Rüne” in the eyes of the innocent girl Gutrune when his eyes are fixed firmly on the floor; and a supremely idiotic interpolation of Gutrune’s villainous brother Hagen trying to get off with her (not even hinted at in Wagner’s libretto, but only a Wagner bore would go on about the liberties taken by Warner’s ugly and shapeless vision that can best be compared to being stranded all night in a particularly ill-designed airport terminal). Not even the magisterial bass of John Tomlinson as Hagen – one of opera’s blackest-hearted and creepiest villains, comparable only to Iago – can redeem this.

At the end of Hagen’s malevolent gloating over his plot to win back the all-powerful ring (“Hier sitz’ich zur Wacht”), Warner and his BBC henchmen clearly rip off Chéreau/Large, with Tomlinson, crazed of eye, staring dead into the camera as the orchestra thunders out.

TV’s visual vocabulary, especially that of drama, has evolved in the generation that’s passed since 1980, and it’s probably superfluous to try and estimate the influence of those changes on this Götterdämmerung. The result is less than perfect – quite why a soprano as statuesque as Lisa Gasteen is meant to coquettishly sneak up on a dozing Siegfried at the start of their brief but passionate love duet at the beginning of Act 1 seems to owe more to cinema and TV than any kind of reality, whether attached to Nordic antiquity or the undefined period of the production’s action. She doesn’t creep or sneak, she tittups – sorry, but she tittups (oh, look it up!). This seems a dramatic fancy as hidebound to our time, as mannered and as aspicked as the “Bayreuth style” initiated by the composer’s widow, Cosima, when she started directing Wagner’s works at Bayreuth from 1886 until 1908. Gasteen’s no cartoon horned-helmet Wagner fatty – just large, but the limited camera angles either capture her from the waist up (usually with too much sidelighting) or from several stalls back.

Since Bayreuth 1980 – when the curtain calls lasted for a world-record 90 minutes (this is a conservative estimate) – there have been comparably great audio recordings of the Ring, notably Levine’s in New York and Thielemann’s underway in Berlin. There have been memorable productions (notably by the late Götz Friedrich). But in terms of TV, Large’s achievement is unapproachable, and it continues to set standards for operas of much smaller dimensions in terms of how characters and sets are specifically framed, how duets, quartets and ensembles are set up etc. Large, and the directors in Europe that he’d learned from had been pupils of those who’d studied with great men of dramatic visuals, with Roller and Rheinhardt, with Cocteau and Stanislavsky.

Much TV opera of the 1980s was fluff, made through the offices of powerful record companies such as Deutsche Grammophon and Sony. They emphasised period productions (Strauss’s Arabella, Weber’s Freischutz) at the expense of visual or dramatic audacity. They played to a safe, undemanding mid-Western US and Japanese audience. Some of this populist crap worked surprisingly well, occasionally to great effect – Catherine Malifitano made a very convincing mid-’90s Tosca, leaping to her death against the skyline of the eternal city. Most opera on TV was a dud, though, and little seems to have changed. Even with a bizarre, if flawed, production like Warner’s, it comes across as frankly ordinary telly, which appeals less to an audience brought up on Dynasty than that brought weaned on 24. Whatever, the visual dynamic of TV is not one that, at the moment, fits well with opera. Soundbiting from the likes of Philip Hensher (perfectly capable, but expensive per minute) makes for intellectual brownie points but it doesn’t quite compensate. And it’s a bit crap when one could commission thinkpieces from the likes of New York’s Andrew Porter or pundits with forbidding foreign names like Carl Dahlhaus or even Nike Wagner, the admirably iconoclastic scion of the master) seems a cop-out.

Will a teenager view this as an access ramp into Wagner’s mad genius as did those lonely refugees in the small hours in ’82 and ’85 regard that great Bayreuth landmark? Let’s hope so – because, as the Ring‘s very dimensions suggest, they ain’t gonna get many other chances. The tragedy is that without a sizeable budget for DVDs they ain’t gonna get to compare it with much else and as for the likes of Lohengrin, Parsifal or Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, forget it. Ditto Lear, Hamlet, Godot. Anyone remotely into anything beyond those intellectual architecture exceeds the dimensions of Castaway had better get used to this – yep, Michael Portillo as your catch-all highbrow host as well.

If someone writes about these broadcasts thusly in a quarter-century’s time, hell, there’s some kinda god. This will have done its work.

Play it again; I’ll still be complaining – but thank God there is still something to complain about. Just play it again. And hope for something better next time.

And how can one regain the life of the mind as it is lived by a child? Proust spent tens of thousands of pages doing it. Freaky Friday and Big wasted a lot of film stock doing it (although in terms of artistic value I think old Marcel probably gets the vote for effort).

I am nearer 40 than 14, and resolutely child-free. I would rather spend an hour French-kissing a gryphon than a minute in the company of anything smaller than a teenager. I tolerate children when I must, however. And, given these nostalgia-powered times, the realities and certainties of childhood seem close enough to touch. After all, how many nonegarians are not nine at heart? It surely can’t be such an imaginative leap.

Anyroad, it requires no imagination to conclude that the BBC’s Raven seems to be a programme almost designed not to appeal to any child at all but rather to lagered-up postgraduates on a retro jag. Indeed, so blatantly does it fly in the face of any conventional wisdom of programming-by-age-and-focus-group that it’s almost admirable. But not quite.

Because Raven’s shtick is so stupefyingly bizarre it’s best to sit down before attempting a description of it. Think a kind of cross between Highlander and We are the Champions. Go on, try. It’s a juxtaposition so weird that it was presumably created either a) to neutralise the inherent silliness of each ingredient or b) to win a parlour game of Least Likely TV Hybrid. But this is only the start.

David Mackenzie is the titular Raven, a cape-swirling, soot-bearded Celtic wise-warrior, part-Young Lochinvar and part-Merlin, with a magic avian-headed staff from whence he gets his name. Four youngsters in sackcloth, mail and helm negotiate what might have served as a kind of spoof Dark Age obstacle course in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Outsize boluses, bludgeons and maces swing menacingly; cowled demons, faceless in their ravenous evil, madly paddle coracles; words like “tower”, “ring” and “wasteland” dot a runically-inscribed map. Raven utters cryptic phrases like, “Only by learning the way of togetherness will ye learn that which makes a true warrior”. Yet in the midst of spookily swirling mists, these kids are asked find the way of the warrior by such epic labours as, er, knocking each other off logs with mini pugil sticks. The contestants, crucially for any audience involvement, don’t even appear to be “real” kids. Judging by their telegraphed reactions to Raven’s camp gestures, they’re all strictly junior pros, and often look like extremely damp, pissed-off junior pros to boot.

The special effects … well, frankly, aren’t. They would have looked cut-price a quarter-century ago back in, say, Into the Labyrinth. A contestant cocking up or failing to commit a specific task sees him (or her) dissolving in a satsuma-coloured gout of what one assumes to be flame, thereby “losing a life” in the process. I’ve been watching for chromakey to make an appearance. It hasn’t yet, but give it time.

Even to a digital-age dolt like the present writer, this all looks quite incomprehensibly amateurish. I’m slightly loath to swallow the conventional wisdom that all children are ipso facto addicts of the console, X-Box junkies, text maniacs; this line is peddled too often by the manufacturers of those wretched things for it to be entirely reliable. Maybe there’s a retro games craze on, but it seems impossible to even begin to imagine that anyone under 14 could find Raven anything but antique in 2007 unless they had been sedulously kept from all electronic media since birth.

Raven‘s defence is likely to be that kids are born dreamers, adventurers, fantasists, and hang the detail. Maybe, but even if they are, and even if they are intellectually unformed, not all of them are fools, by their standards or anyone else’s. The disasters of such obviously slapdash fare as Captain Zep and The Tripods in the 1980s proved that even children have a critical threshold.

Raven isn’t a bad programme; nor is it offensive. It’s just very, very, very odd indeed. What on Earth – who on Earth – is it for? It’s hopeless to try an evade the programme’s obvious Tolkein-debt, and so to a degree it can best be compared to a Gollum, a bundle of unanswerables – how did he get there? When? Why?

Independent of history, of ecology, it’s just there, and that’s it. Try and see it, and find out if you’re any the wiser. 9 or 90, I bet you’re not.

While it’s not as malevolent a concept as Burchill wannabe controversialist Zoe Williams contended in a recent Guardian piece, it’s nonetheless awkward. Its very nature titillates the vanity and insecurity of those who are even more ashamed or afraid of their own ordinariness than most of us. Much as metempsychotics regard reincarnation as a link to forgotten aristocracy and pre-eminence (notice how few ever remember being shit-shovellers in the Augean stables, and how many recall being Hercules), plenty of family-tree-surgeons are the same. Many of the thousands ransacking our resource bases for their ancestries are chasing illusory grandeur and stowed loot.

It’s fair to say, though, that many other diggers are inspired by little more than curiosity or, more poignantly, a craving for “closure”, to cleave to what they regard as a “whole”, ie. a family, be it through the agency of a mislaid sibling or recalcitrant runaway parent. Cue Gene Detectives. This is daytime TV, after all.

Williams was at least on target in claiming that TV’s handling of genealogy has thus far been clod-hoppingly awful. Instead of carefully assembling a series as much about its science, history and practise and its lurking Pandora’s Box of dark emotions as on individual cases, TV muscled in on the scene in 2004 with – what else? – celebrities doing our vicarious time travel for us. On the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? the not-at-all-overexposed likes of Bill Oddie, Tony Robinson and others all found that, unsurprisingly, there was as much ho-hum as oh-Christ in the family closet. Rather like the discoveries most of us make when investigating all but the most incestuously-pleached family trees, in fact.

Which begged the all-too-inevitable question; why use celebs in the first place?

Even more inevitable was ITV1′s moronic rip-off of the format, You Don’t Know You’re Born, in which the likes of Anne Kirkbride didn’t just uncover their forebears but – don’t you wish you’d been at the planning meeting that dreamt this one up? – had a go at their jobs too. Brilliant! Ken Stott pretending to be a Highland haberdasher for 15 minutes of prime time. It’s a winner.

Gene Detectives, meanwhile, was to redress the balance in favour of the ordinary Joe and Josephine, a just-folks delve into just-folks’ lives. But the allure of genealogy is, as we’ve seen, often precisely the antipode of the ordinary … not happening on the Queen of Sheba as a great-aunt, necessarily, but the element of novelty and surprise. People are amused and delighted that the apparently ordered kaleidoscopes of their lives are actually the chance confluence of difference and individuality.

In millions of lives, there can be, for example, rafts of characters. Uncle Tony the King Cockler sucked to his death on the mudflats at Weston; sherry-bibbing aunt Meg, the communist candidate; her son Batty Bertram who tried to fly off the multi-storey carpark. What about great great uncle Eddie, deserted from the Dardanelles, finest ices in Hunstanton (full dairy cream, mark you); and that lost cousin who broke his neck at a TT meet? Fill in the names, the places.

On Gene Detectives what we get are people distinguished by their absolute lack of distinction, who can be relied upon to tick all the lifestyle boxes. The problem, of course, is that the whole thrust of mainstream daytime TV means that “ordinary people” fit a singularly circumscribed template.

They all have cars, mobiles, broadband, kiddies, Sky. Bluewater or Lakeside is treated as a “day out”. Nobody has airs or foreign languages. They don’t want to put the screen through at identikit morning TV programmes who repeat stings and show idents every two minutes and maintain a susurrus of trip-hoppy lifestyle stock music. Neither ugly nor beautiful, they are focus-group fodder, the sort of people who actually sit down and obey those orders to “text us your opinion now”. Transgression chez eux features as material for TV only when it is the target for correction, as per obesity, chain-smoking, kiddie-fiddling. Their behaviour can be relied to slot neatly into a seamless narrative driven by verbal and visual discourses from soaps and supermarket magazines. Adultery and abandonment are thus OK story elements; they are now common enough to be socially normative. They are “inclusive” strands of a plot in a way domestic violence or long-term psychological deviancy (two frequent occupational hazards of any real genealogical investigation) are deemed not.

Not only must the subjects of the programmes be anonymous, colourless – so must their pasts.

An extra criterion of unspoken cynicism at work is that the subjects are often clearly selected because they are emotionally incontinent or just plain vulnerable. “Tom’s an emotional sort of feller”, we’re told, as he prepares to meet his long-lost sister, rugged lip a-tremble. Would he have even been considered were he not?

Gene Detective no. 1 is the genial, epicene Anthony Adolph, a blameless enough bod often seen marching down city streets wearing expensive coats, mobile taped to ear. There are a lot of soft-spoken “caring professionals” helping us through the difficult technical bits like face mapping, although this is the sort of programme where just a single utterance of “DNA” bestows immediate and unarguable scientific credibility. A “counselor” (wouldn’t you know?) is always at hand, and, weirdly, so is Melanie Sykes, touchy-feely enough to be chucked out of the Scientologists.

“Are you sure you’re ready?” she coos to the expectant searcher as the doors part, massaging his or her shoulders like a hooker trying to raise a novice’s tadger.

Here comes the daytime producer’s money-shot, the sobbing clinch. It’s genuinely emetic; oh for Roger Mellie to bellow, “Well, you’d fucking better be ready, mate, cos there’s a whole crew here on overtime.”

Unlike most upsettingly bad and cheap shows, there is at least a half-decent programme hollering to be let out of Gene Detectives, like an up-the-duff waif dispatched secretly to an asylum from a shamed hearth. Adolph is a naturally engaging fellow, admirably patient in this cheapshot world of easy answers and flick-switch waterworks. One of these days – who knows? – he might have graduate, Gene Dd to what he’s worth and will feature retrospectively on a “Lifestyle TV family trees” show – or at worst, a sniggering aside on a Before They Were Famous special. As genealogical researchers often find out, there are some parts of our pasts we actively want to forget.

For the sake of his career, Adolph should want to forget this mess, and pronto.