If there is one word that sums up much present-day television, it is superficiality. Many TV programmes like to skim lightly over a subject, rather than examining it in depth. For example, Russia: A Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby (BBC2) tries to cover "the largest country in the world" in five one-hour programmes. The BBC could have sent an expert on Russia to make an educative documentary series but instead it used Jonathan Dimbleby, who admitted that he had visited Moscow before, about 20 years ago. Perhaps he wanted to compete with his elder brother David, who made a couple of poor series about a much smaller country called Britain.

Jonathan came across like an old-fashioned colonialist: visiting this strange country and chatting amiably with some of its natives, but failing to grasp anything significant about Russia or transmit any of its reality to us viewers. We saw an awful lot of Jonathan as he whizzed through Murmansk, Karelia, St Petersburg, Novgorod and Moscow, making simplistic observations such as that "capitalism is rampant" in Moscow (no, really!). And like those many Michael Palin series, Jonathan underwent various untypical experiences: visiting a white witch in Karelia and going to a bath house in Moscow. There was little to learn from watching Jonathan being beaten with birch branches and massaged vigorously, but the producer probably thought it made "good television". It didn't, but it makes a book you can buy for £25 and a DVD for £24.99.

So how about a view of another vast country? The commentator for Wild China (BBC2) said: "Now for the first time ever, we can explore the whole of this great country." Well, not exactly the whole of it, as the BBC website says: "Although China is not yet quite as accessible to film crews as many other countries, the Wild China production crew were given unprecedented access to almost all areas." A six-hour series is hardly adequate to explore the whole of China's wildlife, especially when you also look at its landscapes and some of its people.

Admittedly the photography was remarkable and often beautiful, although viewers may have had the nagging doubt that this was a sanitised view of a country which is badly polluted and whose government has committed atrocities against its own people as well as Tibetans. The commentary glossed over this by saying: "We know that China faces immense social and environmental problems but there is great beauty here too." So that's all right then.

Last week I welcomed BBC Young Musician of the Year (BBC4) but, as the week went on, I grew increasingly unhappy with the superficial approach to the subject. The programmes spent so much time looking at the everyday lives of the contestants that there was hardly any space left to hear them play.

Things were just as bad on BBC Young Musician of the Year: Grand Final (BBC2). In previous years, we have been shown the five finalists playing complete concertos, but this time we only got snippets from each performance. Time was wasted with presenters asking daft questions, like "Were the competitors nervous?" and "What did you think of your son's performance?"

The Artful Dodgers (Channel 4) provided a salutary lesson about the superficial knowledge of some art "experts", who were fooled into buying forged paintings and sculptures from George and Olive Greenhalgh, a couple of pensioners living in Bolton. The Greenhalghs' son Shaun manufactured the forgeries in their garden shed at the behest of his fantasist father, and he made the exhibits look old with "a mixture of tea and mud." The scam wasn't noticed until a genuine expert, Richard Falkiner, was asked to assess some "Assyrian reliefs" and his reaction was "Don't make me laugh!" Richard said: "I went on to what I call my magic lantern: I believe they are called computers" - and he discovered that the Greenhalghs had sold numerous dodgy artefacts for more than £800,000, even though they went on living in their cramped council house.