Everybody seems to have something to say about the latest controversy to engulf the BBC, so I may as well contribute my twopenn'orth. Jonathan Ross deserves to be sacked, not just suspended from the BBC. Indeed, the BBC should never have employed him (and Russell Brand) in the first place – especially not paying them wads of our licence money. My objection is not so much because both Ross and Brand are tasteless and arrogant, but because the BBC’s primary remit is to be a public-service broadcaster.

If there is a demand from some audiences for the likes of these two, it should be met by other channels, not by the BBC. Public-service broadcasters shouldn't vie for ‘ratings’ with commercial channels. The BBC’s job is not to compete for audiences but (in its own words) “to inform, educate and entertain”. Personally, I found Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (BBC1) much less entertaining than it thought it was, and Ross's crude remarks (especially to his female guests) were often offensive. Fortunately Russell Brand is not on BBC Television, but you can sample his ‘talent’ on Russell Brand’s Ponderland (Channel 4), which is just like all those shows in which someone introduces comical film clips. Russell’s contribution is merely to make crude remarks about the films, larding his comments with naughty words.

Some people have championed Ross and Brand because they are supposedly ‘challenging’, even ‘witty’. But if you want to see something genuinely challenging and witty, there is Bremner, Bird & Fortune (Channel 4), which returned on Sunday with Silly Money. The trio surveyed the credit crunch and posed the question: “Where’s all the money gone?” Their answer was: into the pockets of bankers and speculators – and they told us that many British billionaires pay no tax. They even managed to explain clearly such mysterious financial devices as ‘derivatives’.

Channel 4 is fulfilling a public-service role with programmes like this and Unreported World. The latter this week visited Abkhasia, where “in a bitter ethnic war that has cost thousands of lives already, the killing continues on both sides”. The conflict arose because Abkhasia, supported by Russia, wants independence from pro-Western Georgia. Georgians used to live amicably alongside Abkhasians in the region but now they are being driven from their homes and taking refuge in Georgia. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this war, the results were clearly visible: tragic deaths, ruined buildings, deserted houses, penniless refugees.

Television keeps reminding us about the callousness of warfare, which was also the message of The Last Day of World War I (BBC2), in which Michael Palin described how the Armistice was signed at 5.10am on November 11, 1918, but the pointless killing continued until 11am. Palin's narration was full of clichés but his discoveries were shocking. The US commander, General Pershing, sacrificed 1,100 of his soldiers in a futile attack across the River Meuse. The last Frenchman to be killed in the war was shot just before 11am as he carried a message to tell his comrades about the armistice.

Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand probably regard themselves as alpha males (although ‘omega’ would be more appropriate) – the sort of men who are heroes in Mills & Boon novels. They would fit the bill, because Mills & Boon heroes need to be “ruthless, powerful, arrogant”. In How to Write a Mills & Boon (BBC4), one of the publisher's editors explained that the prerequisites for their books also include “a feisty heroine and really intense emotional conflict based on passion”.

We also learnt that Mills & Boon have a dozen categories of novel, including ‘Modern’ (wealthy and sophisticated), ‘Nocturne’ (supernatural) and ‘Medical’ (doctors and nurses). Last week's programmes about Barbara Cartland showed us a world where romantic novels were churned out in bucketfuls. Although this week's look at Mills & Boon was affectionate, it again seemed to focus on escapist stories which all have the same basic formula