There is a select band of get-up-and-go-go-go programmes whose theme tunes are far better than their content - The Horse of the Year Show, Test Match Special, Grand Prix racing, Match of the Day. I think the Horse of the Year must have been shot: I haven’t seen it for a bit, and I miss it, in the way you miss things you don’t really miss until something reminds you you haven’t missed them for ages. It was weirdly compulsive, a glimpse of the strange world of anthropomorphic eugenics, with dung - the Pony Club being the closest we’ve ever managed to get to the Death’s Head battalion of the Hitler Youth - and of all those men called Dorian who did the breathless, xenophobic, Edwardian commentary: “Can Antonia on Dreadnought see off the big German?” And if it weren’t for the football, Match of the Day would be utterly baggy pants. The format of three tongue-tied Hello! wedding suits, sitting in the window display of a building society, is possibly the laziest, most audience-contemptuous on television.

The best title tune combined with the least deserving programme has to be Ski Sunday. Is skiing the most pointless sport on television after the Boat Race? Why don’t they race like everybody else: in a race, all at once? Doing it one-at-a-time rather spoils the point. It’s a competition made for the terminally vain, a catwalk show for Euro hoorays. How cool can anything be that involves having your gloves attached to your sleeves? Somebody has realised that Ski Sunday is even more moribund and out of touch than Songs of Praise, and they’ve given it a bit of a makeover. They’ve tried to make it Top Gear with mittens.

Top Gear is the off-the-shelf, no-brain format facelift for all middle-aged programmes. They’ve tried it with cooking shows and all sorts of magazine programmes: everybody wants to make their wonks’ hobby show an international, all genders, ages, creeds and races hydra. It doesn’t work because Top Gear isn’t a format, it’s a commitment. They aren’t acting, they really mean it. Jeremy and his little friends are the counter-eco-reformation. It’s not a style choice, it’s saving souls. It’s the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual: one’s dressing up, the other’s an operation. Ski Sunday may have polyester catsuits and fake fur, but it’s still a minor public schoolboy with his arse in the air.

Mad Men (Sunday, BBC4) was apparently what advertising executives on Madison Avenue were called. It’s also a common term for men who are mad. It’s not entirely clear how they tell the two apart. It’s also the title of a big American production set in the early 1960s. This is the sort of costume drama you can relate to, produced with lashings of elan and loads of the smoothest, driest period detail. It was redolent of Jack Lemmon and Dean Martin, Doris Day and Montgomery Clift. Hindsight allows them to make the most of the time’s bigotry and immorality. Advertising is the cheerleader for sexism, misogyny, racism and a vaunting masculine self-satisfaction. Everyone smokes, everyone drinks, everyone lies; everyone’s sense of entitlement is as boundless as American capitalism seems to be. The dialogue lounged and winked with a copywriter’s preening wit. The political incorrectness is handled with a swagger, not a cringe.

This was an immensely confident and enjoyable first episode in what might well turn out to be a cancel-everything series. They’ve understood that the past is most interesting as a harbinger of the present. The layers of cynical superficiality fold together to say something almost profound about the way we are now and how we got here. This should be the point of all period drama, but it so rarely is. Our own reverent, corseted literary nostalgia is a place where the past is answerable only to the dead.

The BBC started its wheyfaced social workers’ series on white Britain with Last Orders (Friday, BBC2), a documentary about the terminal decline of a workingmen’s club on the outskirts of Bradford. It was made by an American first-person cameraman/ writer/director, which is the television version of a singer-songwriter. You can get Bob Dylan, but it’s more likely to be Neil Young; in this case, it was more Neil Diamond, a sentimental and embarrassingly gullible vision of a few ghastly miserabilists, the sort of old gits most of us left home to escape. The film was interminably long, repetitive, unfocused, unresolved and unlovely. I gave up counting how many shots of a tattered cross of St George we were shown to say something or other poignantly.

I understand why they asked an outsider to make this programme, but it lacked any sense of a wider understanding or context. I kept wishing he’d watched all those kitchen-sink films of the 1960s, or the Arenas and Man Alives of the 1970s, before so tiresomely reinventing the working-class documentary wheel as a figure of eight. The point of this whole series is to illuminate white Britain as an embattled, bitter, malevolent stump. It’s a silly, childish attempt to twist noses and cause offence. It didn’t because it was too lame; it lacked any real venom or power; it didn’t have the courage of its own conviction. It isn’t really about white England at all, it’s about the gaps between multiculturalism; it’s about the English only in as much as they are not joining in at the international bring-a-dish, get-to-know-you buffet.

It’s one of those committee-driven series where all the credit is in the concept, and nobody takes much responsibility for what actually gets broadcast. I expect they’ll be sending each other little valedictory e-mails applauding the bravery to dare to fail.

On the other hand, an Englishman was sent to America and showed us precisely how an outside eye can see, if not more, then with a new clarity. In Deep South Divide(Tuesday, BBC2), Tom Mangold examined the current civil-rights furore in Jena, a town in America where white students hung nooses in a tree at a school and black students beat up a white boy and were charged with attempted murder. Mangold is such an old-school reporter, he almost appears in black and white. He went through the evidence with a rigorous thoroughness, he interviewed everybody who had anything germane to say and concluded that the whole thing had been blown out of proportion by both sides. It wasn’t the answer or the denouement a committee of culturally equivalent social sophisticates would have wanted, it wasn’t neat and trite and righteous, it was probably as close to the truth as half an hour of television can get.

I wanted to reach into the screen and shake Mangold by the hand. He’d done something so rare these days, it seemed miraculous. He’d gone to a story and asked questions, without first determining what the answers needed to be. Almost all documentaries are now sold to commissioning editors with their endings and morals already firmly in place, before a foot of film has been shot. Commissioning editors need to know - otherwise, how are they going to be able to schedule them? So what we get is a never-ending sea of information that exists to confirm expectations and finishes every sentence with an exclamation mark!

Editor's choice

• Burning Bush with W
• Revolution at the new Saatchi Gallery
• Boy George on sex, drugs and Amy Winehouse