Steve Coogan via Alan Partridge once came up with a memorable list of proposed television formats. They were so outrageously and pathetically funny, they could almost have been real. I can remember only two: Knowing Me, Knowing You and Monkey Tennis. The joke was that he hadn’t made them up at all; they were all real proposals that had been pitched by real production companies to real editors. I think we should start an annual competition for the most bizarrely, autistically rubbish and weirdly embarrassing programme ideas submitted by grown-ups to television channels. Suggestions on one sheet of A4 with a huge, graphic letterhead and a couple of lines of overfamiliar jocularity, please.

Mind you, the bar has been set very high this week by Millionaires’ Mission (Wednesday, C4). This has carved a new notch on the bedpost of embarrassing displays of tastelessness. For the pitch, I expect they said: “Think Dragons’ Den meets Red Nose Day and stick two fingers up its nostrils.” They got a handfulof self-made millionaires (have you noticed how many labourers it takes to make one self-made millionaire?) and transported them to a subsistence village in Uganda for three weeks to see if they could make a bigger difference to the grinding poverty than your run-of-the-mill bleeding-heart charities. Every component in this concept is socially insensitive and morally reprehensible. To use the poorest people on earth as the ingredients in a bush-charity trial makes me itch like cultural impetigo. Did nobody think theremight be more than a geographical difference betweenspotty nerds asking TV millionaires to back an improved mousetrap and mothers begging them to save a malnourished infant?

What this horrendously thick-skinned wad of nastiness was supposed to prove or change, God and some Tristram alone knows. What I got out of it, personally, was a confirmation that the sort of businessman who wants to go on reality television subtitled with the strap “worth £46m” belongs to a singularly unattractive subspecies, related to but marginally worse than the cretins who appear on Big Brother. At least they could actually use the money. A lifetime spent screwing cash out of hospitality or construction or leisure activities gives millionaires all the binary characteristics associated with totalitarian dictators and sociopaths – a self-justifying cruelty of the omelettes and broken-eggs type, matched with a snivelling sentimentality.

Up until now, the one small mercy of our hopeless viewing addiction to manipulated reality has been that it is our dirty little secret. Now we’re exporting it like neocolonial television to Africa. How much more fulfilling it would have been to transport a village of Ugandans to live for three weeks in a gated community of self-made Cheshire millionaires and offer them lessons in dignity, stoicism, fellowship and communal joy to improve their sad, impoverished lives.

Chris Terrill is one of the few estimable makers of reality programmes. He immerses himself in his subject. He goes beyond empathy, working as his own interviewer, director and cameraman. His commitment, combined with a wry eye for detail, has produced some good television in the past. Commando – On the Front Line (Thursday, ITV) is the beginning of his series on the Marines. Starting with the first day of training, it will end up with deployment in Afghanistan. The problem with this programme is that we’ve all been here before. There is barely a regiment, frigate or squadron in Her Majesty’s service that hasn’t been well worked over by cameras and that fruity voice-over. Though Terrill’s access and intimacy make this particularly attractive, seeing one lot of boys being shouted at by slightly bigger men always looks much the same – and there is a larger question about this type of committed military movie.

The Marines welcome the cameras because they know it will be good for the regiment. Armies and soldiers are beguiling, and journalists have to beware of falling for the esprit de corps. Never for a moment does Terrill question his role in advertising the manly, martial rightness of the regiment. As a film-maker, you should stand back to recognise your responsibility and the consequences of producing an extended series of recruiting commercials. It must be said, though, that none of the hardships or humiliations that the recruits face compared with the selfless valour of a corporal who took a shower in front of the new boys and a few million viewers to instruct them how to wash behind their foreskin. This is your rifle, this is your gun; this is for war, this is for fun. The only thing more shocking was the assumption that the Ministry of Defence is going to give live ammunition to lads who may not know how to wash their own willy.

Michael Palin’s annual conundrum is how to find and what to call his next TV saga. Around the World in 80 Days? Pole to Pole? The Equator? All have literary or geographical purpose. Michael Palin’s New Europe (Sunday, BBC1) is loosely and unconvincingly a brisk meander around the bit that used to hide behind the rusty Iron Curtain. As an idea, it rings with the unmistakable sound of pot-scraping. Palin is very good at being Palin. He ought to be a verb. The Little Englander abroad. He’s good at making the logistics of travel interesting. And he has been blessed with top-of-the-range technical backup, slick directing, David Leanish camerawork and flattering editing. And, of course, quite a lot of money. What he’s not so good at is telling you where he is. Or imparting a sense of place. Or rather, the difference between places. The world shrinks and is strained into a colourful Palin-shaped suburbia in which he meets eccentric men (strangely, rarely women) with character and facial hair, who cook him something, or play something, or ride something, and Palin will – with a reluctant eagerness – join in, being charmingly inept and winningly self-deprecating. There is very little politics.

So, watching him wandering through the former Yugoslavia, muttering embarrassed regrets for their civil wars, massacres, concentration camps, death squads, pogroms, bitterness and vendettas, all sounded like a dinner lady tutting over a playground game that ended in tears. And then he ended up in Albania and found it equally, quaintly bonkers but essentially lovable in a Ruritanian, suburban way.

This isn’t simply a different point of view. It’s not just always looking on the bright side of life. It’s an adamant refusal to look for or at anything else. It’s a wilful blindness born, I suspect, of a squeamish distaste for an unpleasant truth. You wonder if Palin has the humility or range to show anger and disgust, indignation, sadness or regret or anything much more than a bemused incomprehension. He is a Gulliver without a Swift, travelling sans allegory, sans irony, sans judgment. Palin swears this will be his last trip. He has said that before. Well, if it isn’t his, it is mine.

To read more TV reviews, go to our new AA Gill reviews page at timesonline.co.uk/gill

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