There are rooms of television that I never enter. Scrolling down the Sky menu is like looking at the addresses in the lobbies of office blocks. What on earth can they all do? What is Zone Reality +1? What does Pulse show? James Brown, who was once the Malcolm McLaren of men’s magazines, is now running a small bespoke television platform called Sumo. It is, he tells me, the best of YouTube put on TV. But, I said, I thought YouTube was already the best bits from TV? You wouldn’t understand, he replied wearily. Ask your kids.

One of the things selected channels wouldn’t let you see last week was the footballer in red having his leg chopped off by the bigger boy in blue. But it was all over YouTube courtesy of Italian television. Arsenal, I’m told, tried to have it censored for copyright infringement. What on earth were they planning to do with it? I don’t really understand why British television suddenly came over all squeamish. Isn’t this fundamentally what all sport is really about: ritualised warfare? To the occasionally interested, soccer seems to be mostly about injuries and what they sweetly call “fitness problems”. I have fitness problems. Nothing ever seems to fit. Why doesn’t Match of the Day have Fracture of the Week or Slow-Motion Replays of Groin Strain? If you didn’t see the breaking leg, it was pretty extreme. Apparently, the only thing holding his foot onto the rest of his body was his sock. If he’d had a small Irishman with a whip on his back, they’d have shot him there and then.

One of the large storerooms of television I only ever see accidentally or under duress is the vast labyrinth of consumer telly, that worthy and furrow-browed genre that ranges from reconstructions of dark-alley terror in Crimewatch (“Did anyone see this man, or a car that was either blue or green, and might look like this, perhaps driven in an erratic manner?”) to holiday magazine shows (“And the locals say, if you throw convertible currency into the wishing well of the infant martyr and eat a sausage, you’re bound to return. So it’s not goodbye from St Bastard, but au revoir”) to the grim Which Appliance? advice programmes (“Tonight, we ask: should egg cups carry health warnings?”).

There have been attempts to make this tired formulation more watchable - hidden cameras to catch plumbers peeing in your sink, for example - and, last week, Horizon (Tuesday, BBC2), a strand that has always offered well-made, intelligent programmes about the natural sciences, offered up Prof Lesley Regan’s supermarket trolley. The brief was to examine the claims made for Notting Hill food. That is, organic so-called super-foods; cholesterol-lowering margarine; perfect, perfumed, poo-manufacturing yogurt. After so much relentless special pleading for couture ingredients by telly chefs and green proselytisers, then the recent rebuttal by Delia on behalf of faster food, it would seem to be an appropriate moment to broadcast a cool programme about the science behind the medical claims and promises made on behalf of food by people looking to add value to the things they sell.

But, in a fit of accessibility, relevance and, I suspect, intellectual embarrassment, Horizon covered this simple and straightforward idea with all the bright, smiley, stick-on formatting that a committee of equal-opportunity Tristrams could come up with. Instead of using a real reporter, with a nutritionist, biologist and chemist to inquire and offer evidence, it got an obstetrician. I can only assume this was because she looked nice, in a Lady Archer sort of way, and had an easy television manner that I’m sure someone had said was accessible. The visual furniture was made up of pointless mood shots and filler. There was a tiresome ordinary-people’s challenge, and the commentary was offered by a jocular, DJ-ish Peter Capaldi, who was forced to refer to Regan as “Prof”.

All of this degraded the serious intent until it was meaningless as an investigation into the trendy marketing of food. This was as bad an example as you could wish to find of tarty, ersatz packaging obscuring a simple good idea. Its findings and results were made worthless by the frivolity and faux dumbness of its valueless production. This is what happens when good programmes go organic.

In Portillo on Thatcher (Monday, BBC4), there was a quick montage of Tory cabinet ministers who lost their seat on the same night he famously lost his. It was a salutary quiz in forgetfulness. They were all strangely familiar, but I couldn’t name one of them, and I covered that election, read every paper, watched every news broadcast, followed it all like a bloodhound. But their names had gone, along with their cabinet posts, their tiny triumphs and pathetic disasters. All wiped off the whiteboard of life. Mind you, I could tell you the names of television presenters and pop singers of that year. I could remember the plots of films and novels. It’s just politicians who sink without a discernible ripple after they have finished fiddling with the bowels of state.

It is, in part, because they are so bad at finding anything else in the public eye that we’ll pay them to do. But it’s also because we have very, very dull politicians. Look around the world: everyone else’s politics is more exciting than ours. I suppose, in a Chinese-curse sort of way, uninteresting political times may be a good place to live. But I really can’t get excited about the Speaker’s wife’s taxi receipts. Michael Portillo is one of the few exceptions. But his interest as a person rose in inverse proportion to his ability as a politician. The worse he got, the nicer he seemed. And he’s now a rather thoughtful television presenter. But, really, he should stay away from this part of his life. Even though he’s rigorously self-critical and quite humble about it, it’s still a misspent youth.

Watching Mrs Thatcher again, it was rather shocking to realise how eye-swivellingly, carpet-chewingly bonkers she was. The nation was in thrall to Joan of Arc’s nuttier nanny, a woman who rose out of the shires hearing voices promising to lay foreigners low. This programme was oddly disconnected from the here and now. Even if you were a political train spotter, it was too dull and unrevealing to maintain an interest in the spats and loathing of 20 years ago. The reason we forget about politics and politicians is that it’s much nicer and kinder than remembering them.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Thursday, Virgin 1) is the story of a strong, driven woman with good tits who believes her boy is going to be the saviour of the world. Sounds frighteningly like Margaret and Michael all over again. Actually, it’s a cartoonishly exciting retelling of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies from the age of Thatcher. Robots come back from the future to kill the putative leader of human resistance. The “good Terminator” part is taken by a young woman with all the dramatic ability and presence of a cutlery drawer. So, we’re offered one small, whingeing lad being protected by a pair of powerful, beautiful Valkyries. There hasn’t been a really good lesbian frenzy since Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You can find Connor giving the ’bots a good licking on Virgin.

Editor's choice

• Desperados with avocados - a sort of Guy Ritchie film
• Live fast, die young: The 27 Club
• Madonna's 50 most memorable moments