I’ve had a surprising number of letters asking why I didn’t review The Great Global Warming Swindle (Thursday March 8, C4) that has so upset the evangelical mullahs of the orthodoxy on CO2 and brimstone. Was it, a number of you pointedly inquired, because shadowy secret hands had prevented me from mentioning it?

Sadly, the truth, as ever, is less conspiracy, more cockup. I did begin to watch it, but the DVD I’d been sent didn’t work. I asked the programme-makers for another one, but it never came, so it didn’t get reviewed. This, by the way, is far from rare. Production companies spend hundreds of thousands on their programmes and then, for the sake of a few quid, entrust making review copies to the work experience.

I did see it in the end, and was struck by how it suffered from all the sins it accused the environmental lobby of enjoying: there was selective science and partial interpretation. I suspect that most of us who aren’t scientifically competent enough to make informed judgements, and therefore have to rely on the media, need to find another way of forming an opinion.

It’s helpful to ask the oldest question in jurisprudence: Cui bono? Who benefits? Who gains from a belief global warming is not man-made or significantly influenced by man? Well, obviously, people who drill oil wells, own power stations or appear on popular motoring programmes all have an interest in global warming being none of our business.

But don’t for a moment imagine that the bicycle-riding, organic-hedgerow-grazing, self-denying, 40-watt miserablists are in fact selfless crusaders for the common good. Never underestimate the sustaining pleasure in a hair shirt. Just look at George Monbiot, and witness a man who couldn’t be happier about the imminent demise of life as we know it. It’s given him purpose, prestige and celebrity: without global warming he’d be a geography teacher. In the end, if it is the end, I think it’s better to waste as little as possible, to live with a modest care, to mind what you eat and to have a conscience about what your life costs other people’s lives. It may or may not change the weather. It will be better for your soul and your state of mind, and make you a nicer person.

George Monbiot turned up in Peter Hitchens’s splenetic rant about David Cameron and the Conservatives, Cameron — Toff at the Top (Monday, C4). Seeing Monbiot and Hitchens together reminded me of those animal photos, beloved of the tabloids, where Alsatians marry ducks and tigers cohabit with goats. Among journalists, Hitchens is fondly known by the nickname Bonkers. He’s called Bonkers Hitchens because he is raving bonkers, in a way that sells papers but makes him very annoying to sit next to on long flights. I’ve covered elections with him and seen him chase cars like an incensed border collie.

His thesis is that Cameron is nothing but a filthy upper-class prat. He revealed this as if it was a well-guarded secret. Cameron, he insisted, as is the wont of his elitist privileged class, had taken the good old working-class Tory party and made it an annex of the smug, snobbish Labour party, thereby running together Magna Carta, habeas corpus and the rules of Association Football, thus destroying democracy as we understand it. The great thing about Hitchens is that he never disappoints. Blissfully, he is utterly bereft of self-irony. For Bonkers there was nothing remotely odd or absurdly hilarious about hating the Conservative party for having Eton-educated, upper-class boys in it. Hitchens should be encouraged to do more. He’s like a lost biblical character from The Life of Brian.

Jo Brand is a consistently dependable character who lives inside your television, never far from a programme you just happen to flick by. Game shows, quizzes, documentaries, chat: she is an omnivore for genres. The format may be dross, the production dull or daft but Brand guarantees a certain interest, some quality, a quip and a bit of common-sense. You know she’s a good person underneath that tent. She’s got the nicely-nicely persona for the front-room box off pat.

She was the first performer in what ought to be a nicely successful, comforting format, Play It Again (Sunday, BBC1). They are asking celebrities to learn to play an instrument in a limited amount of time before giving a public performance. That sounds contrived and a bit whimsical. However, most of us who can’t, wish that we could play something, and watching someone learn music is far more entertaining than watching them be a circus act, ride a horse, do a commando assault course or fail to lose a stone. Playing music is something we empathise with, and you know that empathy is ingredient X in all TV programmes. Brand wanted to play the organ, and by the time she’d pulled out all the stops for a Bach cantata and fugue at the Albert Hall, I was utterly charmed, engaged and swaddled in empathy. Brand was self-deprecating and played miraculously. As the credits rolled, I thought: how rare to find a reality format that actually wants someone to succeed at doing something good, rather than rely on the pleasure of watching embarrassing people fail doing things that are reprehensible or pointless.

Which brings me neatly to The Apprentice (Wednesday, BBC1), which returned last week and which most of you seem to adore. I think it’s pretty vile. The contestants are greasy and malevolent and must deeply shame their parents. Alan Sugar is crassly unpleasant, a pantomime Ebenezer. The whole edifice is built on small-time greed, fickleness, mendacity and insincerity. I suppose it’s only fitting that whoever turns out to be best then gets to spend more time with the repellent, inappropriately named Sugar, who I suspect will end up having to read the eulogy at his own funeral.

Get Your Act Together with Harvey Goldsmith (Tuesday, C4) is a talent show — horrible, don’t bother — where he does a Rory Bremner imitation of Alan Sugar. Plainly, being Alan Sugar is how you get onto the box this month.

Wedding Belles (Thursday, C4) was a one-off, made-for-TV film written by Irvine Welsh, an author who has mined the same thin vein of inspiration for far too long and now comes up with more dross than ore. This was essentially a cartoon-grotesque, clumsily written small-screen pastiche of Quentin Tarantino meets Reckless. Four working-class women with a variety of attractive delinquencies commiserate over feckless men. Welsh constantly boasts that he’s really only interested in the margins of society, but he is the most middle-class of writers: holding up excitingly disgusting characters from the underclass for the fris-son of pleasure it will give his bourgeois audience, like some Victorian minister. Wedding Belles would have been daft were it not for two things: a heroic cast of women who made it not just watchable, but for moments compelling; and the fact that it was all spoken in broad metropolitan Scots. Even the most banal truisms have a meaty rhythmic imperative when delivered with a Scottish accent and a bit of muscle. This would never have got made if it had been set in Bristol.

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