Vinnie Jones was on the television the other night, explaining the situation in Kosovo. The idea that Jones would one day deliver a potted history of political tensions in the Balkan peninsula would have seemed gently satirical, at the very least, when the shaven-headed enforcer was dishing it out for Leeds United and Wales. Then again, when you think about it, it makes a kind of sense. It's all trouble.

So here comes Vinnie on Vinnie Jones' Toughest Cops (ITV4), one of those slightly free-form documentary shows about police work that grants us the opportunity to stand just behind a bunch of law enforcement agents as they go barging into the miserably underfurnished apartment of some hapless drug dealer or gun runner with a pixilated face. (Have you noticed how all criminals on television look the same these days - smudgy and blurred? If you see anyone like that in the street, arrest them immediately. They're clearly up to no good.)

More likely than not, you will be familiar with the format - and perhaps overly so, given that police video footage occupies most of the space in the television schedules not taken up by people cooking or having their houses altered. But Vinnie Jones' Toughest Cops, which has travelled far and wide in its efforts to bring us “the most dangerous beats on the planet”, does at least offer an interesting twist, in the form of a conveniently disappearing host.

Watch the programme for a spell and you will be obliged to notice what one can only describe as a distinct lack of film of Jones in the thick of the action. We see him at the top of the show, in front of what appears to be a set of strangely British-looking lock-up garages, and setting the scene with a degree of palpable menace that has escaped some of the other great television historians of our time, such as Simon Schama and Dr David Starkey. We also see Jones, in the credits, crouching down to pick up some spent bullets, with an expression on his face that might be moral regretfulness or might be awed enthusiasm, it's not easy to say.

And we hear him throughout the hour, in voiceover form, usefully crunching the numbers on Balkan heroin trafficking, etc. But the minute we cross to Kosovo and start breaking people's doors down at 3am, in the accepted manner, there is no sign of Jones. Indeed, four episodes in, Vinnie Jones' Toughest Cops has yet to yield one shot of Jones standing beside a cop, tough or otherwise, let alone looking on approvingly as someone with a pixilated face is frogmarched to a waiting squad car.

So what's going on here? Has Jones developed a surprising new camera shyness - one that could critically hinder a burgeoning career? Or is the Wimbledon legend turned Hollywood bit-part player officially too important to be risked in the front line, among the scar-faced crims and worryingly random gangsters.

Let's be honest, ITV4 probably wanted Ross Kemp. During a string of series of this kind, Kemp has carved a terrifying niche as television's argy-bargy supremo, ready to voice an edgy piece to camera even while, in the Moldovan town square over his shoulder, rival football gangs are battering each other with stolen riot shields.

But Kemp is a formidably busy person these days - places to go, people with pixilated faces to see. Imagine trying to reach him on his mobile, in any case. You would never hear him above the sound of it all kicking off in some Latvian café or other. So the job went to Jones, whose commitment to the project, for whatever reason, didn't extend as far as leaving Hertfordshire.

In a similar way, Newcastle United probably would have preferred Terry Venables to have acted as their stopgap manager (size and breachability of gap yet to be established), but ended up with Joe Kinnear. Which leads one to wonder: just as Dennis Wise holds the title at Newcastle of executive director (football), is he also in some kind of floating, multi-platform role as executive director (television)?

One asks only because the number of Wisey's old muckers and later connections holding down decent careers in British television is unignorable. There's Jones, obviously, but also John Fashanu, Robbie Earle and even Dean Holdsworth, who did so well under Janet Street-Porter on Deadline, the magazine-based reality challenge show. And that's before we mention Warren Barton's mysteriously silent rise through the ranks of the football analysts.

The Crazy Gang hasn't just (in the famous formulation of John Motson) defeated the Culture Club - it has become the Culture Club, the greatest generation of stars of the small screen that football has produced. Each of the aforementioned must surely be a well-thumbed card in Wise's Rolodex. Whisper this in the North East, but I think Wise may have begun to take over everything.