Here’s a question for clever Fry on QI. Name a newspaper proprietor with a reputation as a decent, benign, honest, evenhanded champion of truth. Don’t bother Googling it – there isn’t one. Beaverbrook, Rothermere, Horatio Bottomley, Randolph Hearst, Conrad Black, Richard Desmond and the other one, whose name escapes me – all get dressed in the same motley of ego and megalomania. Even in fiction you won’t find a winning proprietor: Citizen Kane, Lord Copper, Lambert Le Roux in Pravda. In the typecast roles of our cultural kabuki, the newspaper owner is an out-and-out baddie. Though we hold freedom of speech to be our most precious right, we suspect the worst of those who provide the means of expressing it. “Larger than life” is the headline that accompanies all proprietors, and none came larger or livelier than Robert Maxwell, one-time owner of the Daily Mirror.

In retrospect, Captain Bob could be seen as the model for New Labour, an economic immigrant who became both a plutocrat and a socialist MP, who believed in an unregulated market and a welfare state. Unfortunately for him, he was a decade too early. Maxwell’s Shakespearian hubris and nemesis should be the stuff of operatic tragedy, but in Maxwell (Friday, BBC2), as conceived by Craig Warner, it came across rather more like Jackie Collins, less tragedy than Schadenfreude.

What we remember about Maxwell was his size. He was physically imposing. David Suchet, who was cast to play the paper monster, has many talents and accomplishments, but a physical presence isn’t among them. With his slick, black wig, he was rather like an otter pretending to be a walrus. Oddly, his character was given no context. The newspaper business might as well have been a greengrocer’s or undertaker’s. Maxwell’s wide range of acquaintances and sycophants remained unmentioned, anonymous, and the characters who did turn up came on like a selection of Aunt Sallys and punchbags. The only person who stood out as being believable and three-dimensional was Betty, his wife, played by Patricia Hodge.

We were never shown what made Maxwell successful in the first place. Suchet offered him up as stupid, neurotic and risible, without any charm, charisma or power. The dynamic of his demise was wholly unbelievable; the drama was made up of Maxwell doing ledgerly things with imaginary money. As dialogue, this was rather less interesting than medical jargon or the Teletubbies. It is astonishing that a writer could so neatly fillet a true story and throw away all the meat, just keeping the skin and bone. Mind you, he’d have made a good subeditor on the old Mirror. As with all drama documentaries, this claimed to be a revitalisation of the past. It wasn’t. But then, apart from his family and the company’s deprived pensioners, who now cares? There was a small, telling detail: the bullied Kevin Maxwell, announcing his father’s death at sea (a denouement that was numbly dropped), mispronounced the name of the boat, which was also his sister’s name. It’s the first lesson for junior reporters – always, always check you’ve got their names right.

At the beginning of her new series, Victoria’s Empire(Sunday, BBC1), Victoria Wood mentioned that going to visit everywhere in the world named Victoria is less a programme idea, more a holiday. In fact, it’s not so much a holiday as a geography quiz with only one answer. So, instead, she’s going to go and visit the Victorian Empire because, because... It was never entirely clear why, because her only connection seems to be her Christian name.

As a series, this comes from the same Tristram’s wish list as Pam Ayres takes over The Sky at Night and Dawn French does Life on Earth and then eats it. I know exactly what they wanted from this series: they wanted Michael Palin in drag – which, when you stop to think about it, is not such a bad description of Victoria Wood. They dreamt of a big, comforting, middlebrow, middle-aged, middle-English, easy-on-the-eye, amusing-on-the-ear travelogue that they could roll out into a multinational franchise. All they needed was a reason to start. Victoria’s name would do – except, as it turned out, it wouldn’t.

Wood set off for India and Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea with a suitcase full of nothing more than Lancashire common sense and a very bad haircut, instead of expertise, understanding, much of an opinion or a script. I have a guarded admiration for Wood as a writer and an actress, but she plainly isn’t an explorer. Her comic strong suit – in fact, her only suit – is a quaintly deflating parochialism, and parochialism really doesn’t travel. Her observations started off as trite and grew to be wilfully small-minded. The humour that was supposed to keep us all jogging along never got above the formulaically whimsical, and whimsy is to comedy what boxing gloves are to onanism.

The entire first episode (and, I expect, series) can be summed up by Wood’s looking sideways at the camera, pausing and saying sotto voce, “It wouldn’t happen in Nuneaton,” before giving us her patented look.

The cumulative effect is of laughing at foreigners, with their funny voices, strange clothes, disgusting habits and repellent food, which I am sure was not what the decently correct Wood was aiming at. To go to a city as fabulously faceted and stuffed full of anecdote and interest as Calcutta and say it looks like Leeds town hall simply beggars the eyes in her head.

The Lie of the Land (Thursday, C4) was a documentary that went into rural England by way of the Countryside March and the hunting ban, then turned left to follow the men who have to dispose of unwanted livestock made worthless by our confusion and ignorance. A place where squeamishness and sentimentality lead to suffering and death, not just of the animals but of the communities and lives that tend them. The film became a profound examination of our relationship and contract with the life between hedges and our irrational and lumpy response to death. It was made by Molly Dineen, who is one of the most inspired and talented weavers of television. The story of the confusion, anger and sadness in the country may not be new, but it has rarely been told with such pathos and profundity.

Dineen, whose presence is always just off camera, has an ability to allow the shy, the tongue-tied and the taciturn to express themselves with a sort of quiet, heroic grandeur. She does something cameras do far too rarely. She allows people who aren’t glib, stage-struck or idiots time to be themselves and say what they feel. Television is constantly running against deadlines of its own invention, always hurrying up, always running out of road, demanding snappy answers, trite clichés and paraphrases. It treats nonprofessionals like awkward cripples holding up the gurgling flow of light and sound. When you see ordinary, rough-edged folk given space, treated with respect, it looks like revelation.

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