Was ever a nation such the subject of as much Barnum-esque cultural rubbernecking as the US? Roll up and ogle the crazy Southerners parading their guns and redneckery! Marvel at the Pacific Coast inhabitants with their freakish plastic bodies! Be astonished by the religious Mid-Westerners and their Bibles! Shunning a Louis Theroux caricature-fest, but failing to provide substantial analysis either, Stephen Fry in America (BBC1) was as bland as its title. Fry, ostensibly driving a ‘London’ taxi to give the first of this six-part series a suitably rakish air, trod on Bill Bryson's metaphorical toes as he traversed New England.

Our correspondent smirked at deer hunters clad in check jackets and murmured appreciatively, without innuendo, at a submariner‘s big periscope; the great man nodded as a Noo Yawk cab driver confessed that he got scared of being robbed while driving at 3am. In other words, Fry was paid to get in the way of ordinary folk going about their business. You don’t have to have trekked around the lush states of the north east to have heard Ben and Jerry’s ice cream comes from Vermont (oh, and ice cream’s really quite cold, by the way — Stephen told us), nor that Boston had a famous tea party in the 1770s. This was very much what is known as ‘accessible programming‘. Fry was also prone to being disingenuous. When he fitted in a cursory interview with one of the founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, he raised an eyebrow on hearing the well-known online encyclopaedia relied on legions of voluntary contributors — hardly a ringing endorsement for his technology column in Saturday’s Guardian.

Anyone still to be disabused of the notion that Fry is less a national treasure than a man with friends in high places should have seen the fawning that accompanied his appearance on Never Mind the Buzzcocks (BBC1) which has long given up the pretence of being an irreverent rock-based quiz and is these days a love-in between host Simon Amstell and his autocue. (Perhaps this is why the magnificent Bill Bailey has quit the show, which has been plodding on since 1996). If the ubiquitous Fry, who intoned imperiously when allowed by Amstell, becomes any more of a smug git, he’ll give John Mortimer a run for his money.

Poor old, serious Simon Schama. His series The American Future (BBC2) is excellent and timely, but it’s easy to laugh at him because his head wobbles all the time when he talks to camera, and he wears the strangest specs on TV: they’re beige and the bit over the bridge of his nose is too thick. His authoritive programme on the American South West’s troubled relationship with its breathtaking landscape didn’t need its polarising filters and sombre soundtrack, but I wasn’t complaining — I was too busy learning that, for instance, oil wells in the pre-Depression boom were left uncapped to gush ‘black gold’ to reinforce the impression that the region possessed unlimited resources.

Channel 4 claimed six million viewers ended up watching Peter Kay's spoof Britain’s Got the Pop Factor and Possibly a New Celebrity Jesus Christ Superstar Strictly on Ice, which means about five million must have switched off with a wry shrug. The programme — written and directed by Kay (who also played a contestant called Geraldine) — was well observed, and it was a coup to rope in celebs such as Paul McCartney and, er, the Cheeky Girls, but the genre is beyond parody (which hasn‘t stopped others from trying over the past decade). This was at least five years too late to be satirical and if it were intended as a playful homage, Kay’s much-hyped extravaganza was too barbed. The black humour was occasionally delicious — I sniggered in particular at the antics of 2 Up 2 Down, a foursome whose female members did not let the fact they were ‘wheelchair users‘ deter them from reproducing Bucks Fizz‘s skirt-ripping routine. But Kay ought to hurry up with that next series of Phoenix Nights.