What he watched:
Big Brother C4
Lie Lab C4
Brits Get Rich in China C4
Hotel California: From the Byrds to the Eagles BBC4
The barbed wire, the watchtowers, the braying mob: ah yes, summer's here again in the glamorous and fun-filled shape of Big Brother. But before the happy festivities could commence, the programme was forced to acknowledge the authority of a Bigger Brother, otherwise known by its Schwarzeneggian title, The Regulator.
Like a Methodist minister standing in front of a brothel, warning of moral turpitude, Ofcom prefaced the show with a 'summary of adjudication'. This was in response to the 44,500 complaints made by viewers earlier this year over the alleged racism on Celebrity Big Brother. Solemn and censorious, it concluded that: 'Channel 4 failed to handle appropriately the strong content it was transmitting.' Should the channel make the same mistake again, it will have its food rations reduced and not receive any alcohol for a whole week.
With the public dressing-down out of the way, the dressing up could begin. First came Sam and Amanda, hysterical teenage twins. They wore matching outfits of not very much and strutted for the cameras like a pair of veteran red-carpet vixens. They liked 'pink' and 'boys' and, far more importantly, they knew what they didn't like: 'chavs'.
Ofcom has made it clear it will not tolerate prejudice of any kind, unless, of course, it is directed at the white working class (patron demon: Jade Goody). You can say anything about 'chavs' on television and no one will blink, much less complain. Such is the arbitrary enforcement of the modern offence. Incidentally, the twins, we were informed, are studying to be social workers. Where? In Barbieland?
After the screaming sisters came a succession of other contestants, the majority of them modelling the same bimbo chic as the first two. There was the unemployed lap dancer, a Victoria Beckham lookalike and Emily, a drama student whose teeth cost £4,000 - which is an oddly unimpressive sum to boast about when it comes to dentistry.
Set against this convention of radical feminists were Lesley, a 60-year-old Women's Institute member, who appears to have fallen in through her TV set; Tracey, a pink-haired cleaner with a compulsion to shout, 'Have it!' in the absence of having anything else to say; a Welsh nanny, who looks and sounds like a Little Britain character, and looks and sounds even more like the favourite to win; and 53-year-old Carole, a bisexual 'peace campaigner'. 'If people want an argument,' she announced, 'here's the fucking argument.'
Why is it that pacifists so often turn out to be not only frighteningly aggressive but also proud of it? Carole, we learned, stood as a candidate for the Respect Party. Which means she is the second member of her party to be a contestant in the house, her equally benign and placid leader, George Galloway, having appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. It was Galloway, of course, who sat in complicit silence as his white British male friend, Pete Burns, launched a venomous attack on black female foreigner Traci Bingham.
Yet somehow, even though the highly articulate Burns was far more insulting than Jade Goody ever managed with Shilpa Shetty, there was no campaign or protest, no Ofcom warning. We shall see whether Carole is an opponent of bullying and intimidation or if, like Galloway, she takes a more nuanced and participatory stance.
But the key point about the contestants, one that only gradually dawned on them, was that they were all women. It was this year's novelty gesture: an all-female household. At least until Friday, when a lone man was due to be introduced. It's a smart idea with the potential for some fascinating social observation and, from a family entertainment perspective, backstabbing, pain and ritual humiliation.
Had the people at Endemol decided not to become millionaire television producers, they could have almost certainly scraped a living as experimental psychologists on a Midwest campus. You feel as if they've read their BF Skinner, or perhaps it's their W Shakespeare. As flies to wanton boys are the housemates to Big Brother. The difference being that, while it may be for Endemol's profit, it's for our sport.
Buried away in the schedules with almost no advance publicity was Lie Lab. Making use of new techniques in magnetic resonance imaging, the programme set out to discover if its subjects were telling the truth. Last week those subjects were Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, better known as two-thirds of the Tipton Three.
That was the name given to the three young men who were picked up in Afghanistan in late 2001 by American forces and transported to Guantanamo Bay, where they were held without charges or trial for two years before being released back to Britain.
Campaigners for the men have always maintained they were innocent tourists-cum-aid workers, caught up in the invasion of Afghanistan. This was also the line of Michael Winterbottom 's film, The Road to Guantanamo. And given the tone and approach of Lie Lab, it also seemed to be a belief shared by the programme makers.
But at the end of what was actually a rather dry and laborious piece of science TV, when confronted with results that suggested he was less than forthcoming with the truth, Ahmed confessed (Rasul had refused to go through with the test) not only to visiting an Islamist training camp but also handling weapons and learning how to use an AK47.
None of which justifies or excuses his sub-legal and subhuman treatment in Guantanamo, but it does raise some questions about the portrayal, in some quarters of the media, of the Tipton Three as blameless heroes. The Lie Lab seemed almost embarrassed by its findings and was neither prepared, nor set up, to follow through on the story. But perhaps another TV programme might one day ask what a British citizen (or citizens) was doing at a guerrilla training camp, learning to fire weapons, in the middle of a war.
The entrepreneurs in the excellent Brits Get Rich in China could have done with the Lie Lab's MRI scan. As they tried, with varying degrees of competence, to reposition themselves in China's vast new economy, the three Britons were never entirely confident that they were on speaking terms with the truth. That's the nature of business, of course, but seldom has that nature looked so raw and uncompromising as in China's unregulated market.
As Vance Miller, a plain-speaking bathroom-fittings salesman from Rochdale, put it: 'I'd like to say they speak a different language, but they do.' Vance was good value in any currency but particularly in the coin of television. We saw him arrive at his new factory near the North Korean border. It was supposed to have had a foundation laid but was in fact just barren scrubland.
He turned to a sheepish-looking Chinese man and went into a riff of Basil Fawlty-like exasperation that seemed hard to distinguish from a mental breakdown. 'Where's the base? Where's the fucking base? This is the base?' he asked, surveying the untouched soil. 'This is the base! Hello, base! Hiya, base!'
The picture that emerged in communist China was of capitalism taken to its Victorian extreme, with whole cities dedicated to making lavatories or taps. It wasn't pretty and it was plainly corrupt. As one Chinese go-between said: 'Doing business in China is like the Wild West - except they know how to shoot better than the cowboys.' Still, the imitation luxury bathroom gear looked very convincing.
Another group of ambitious desperadoes inspired by the Wild West was the Eagles, the phenomenally successful Seventies country-rock act. Hotel California: from the Byrds to the Eagles traced the evolution of LA's music scene from the peace'n'love harmony groups of the late Sixties, through the singer-songwriters of the early Seventies to the drug-propelled stadium monsters of the middle decade.
There were many fine sets of teeth on display, which must have cost far in excess of £4,000 a pop, and a fabulously raddled David Crosby. Like many before them, the filmmakers could not resist the temptation to construct an all-embracing narrative from the magnificent emptiness of LA. But there were just too many bands and musicians to cover, and too few star interviews to render a definitive account. They might have fared better had they limited the story to one particular scene at one moment in history. Instead we got the familiar tropes of Laurel Canyon, Altamont and the destruction of the Californian dream by one of its deranged off spring, Charles Manson. I noticed that the front page of the British newspaper that was used here to illustrate the Manson story also featured a headline about London Underground: 'Northern Line not suitable for cattle'. It's actually quite reassuring to know in the age when China has gone turbo-capitalist and even Big Brother is being watched that some things will never change.
Follow my leader
On Newsnight the six candidates for deputy leader of the Labour party lined up behind mini-podiums like contestants on The Weakest Link. It was a bizarre scene in which the participants seemed uncertain whether to pitch themselves at their fellow MPs, party members, or trade unionists, all of whom have a vote; at the general viewer, who may have watched transfixed but has no say in the matter; or at Jeremy Paxman.
Hilary Benn and Alan Johnson were the most impressive. The most craven by a distance was Harriet Harman, who rushed to apologise for voting for the invasion of Iraq, refused to say whether she would want to retain Trident, and whose attempt to establish her credibility with party activists appeared to rest on omitting to use David Cameron's and Margaret Thatcher's first names.
Paxman was a more than able inquisitor, but just this once it would have been good to see Anne Robinson in the role, if only so she could have fixed Harman with one of her bloodless stares and uttered the immortal words: 'You are the weakest link. Goodbye.'
Kathryn Flett is away