Why has it taken television so long to produce a big series on China (BBC Two), the country that’s like the juggernaut you notice in your rear-view mirror as you’re pootling along the motorway: huge, powerful, looming forever larger, and just about to overtake you?

Maybe it’s because China is moving so quickly that documentary-makers worried that by the time their series reached the screen it would already look out of date. Chinese society seems to be changing so fast that making a TV series about life there today might easily feel like buying a digital camera and finding that by the time you’d got it home from the shop it had already been rendered redundant by the invention of an entirely new digital imaging technology.

One consequence is that China has taken over from Japan as the economic giant we know we should be boning up on, but about which we remain dismally ignorant. We have its products in every room of our house, but very little idea of what makes the country, or its people, tick. When it comes to gaps in our knowledge about China, most people have more gaps than knowledge.

We wouldn’t regard people from Penzance, London, Liverpool and Newcastle as an homogenous group, all with the same lifestyles, living standards, diets, pastimes, dress sense, beliefs, politics and accents. But we cosily think of 1.3 billion Chinese — embracing 56 officially recognised ethnic nationalities — as a one-size-fits-all nation whose population apparently all follows a cuisine that can be printed on an A4-size flyer folded into three.

Faced with evidence that some Chinese cities are now a forest of skyscrapers and neon, where the middle classes spend their weekends at home-improvement superstores choosing their new kitchens, yet also knowing that vast areas of China remain rural and poor, we have adopted a kind of Orwellian double-think, happily allowing ourselves to hold two contrasting images of modern China in our minds simultaneoulsy, without fretting unduly about how they fit together.

Jonathan Lewis’s China is at least a start. It offers glimpses of a country in transition; both steeped in its past, and also pelting towards its future. There are flourishes of capitalism; shoots of democracy; there is argument; and there’s Armani alongside the Mao suits.

This opening episode felt a little worthy at times, as if it occasionally felt overwhelmed by the breadth of the terrain it had chosen to cover. Perhaps some of the vibrancy of modern China will come along later. For now, keeping track of China feels like staring at an undeveloped Polaroid fresh from the camera: you can’t be certain how things will turn out.

Did you catch Imagine . . . A Picture of the Painter Howard Hodgkin (BBC One)? Did you, too, marvel at how he manages to pull it off, so stylishly, week after week? Yes, just how does Alan Yentob manage to find a way to travel the world twice over in each series of Imagine? We’ve been to Europe, America, Japan, South Africa. This week Yentob packed his bags for India, for a trip with Britain’s greatest living painter of sumptuously arresting pictures whose meaning are a mystery even to his admirers.

Hodgkin seems to like it that way. He will admit that he is inspired by the scenery and colours of India. But he doesn’t much care for talking about his paintings. He says words are the English disease: they come between the painting and the viewer. Now 73 years old, with a major retrospective heading for the Tate, Hodgkin is in no hurry to explain anything, except to say that painting is “agony”, and to tell us that “I’m not an abstract painter”. Okey dokey.

The novelist Julian Barnes owns a lovely, small Hodgkin. It teeters teasingly between being a bewitching burst of bold, broad, red brushstrokes, and being the work of a kindergarten pupil. “I used to worry,” Barnes admits, “that I couldn’t articulate what a picture like this does to me internally when I look at it. But now I think that’s only a social handicap, rather than a failing in regard to me and the painting . . . One of the things I love is, leaching out from all this exuberance are these little areas of green/grey/brown and I just sort of found my thoughts going down the line of: this is a sort of blazing picture about sort of joy, and this is, behind every joy there is some melancholy. Might be complete bollocks!”

But if it is bollocks, Julian, then I know of an arts presenter who could accompany you on a tour of five continents to explore — purely for the purposes of artistic enlightenment — whether your hunch about the identity of bollocks is on the button or not.

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