Ihave always thought that part of any critic’s job is to be the voice from the stalls, to speak up on behalf of the audience. With a TV critic, that includes the misguided, deluded simpletons who find themselves on the wrong side of reality, the butt of the entertainment. Last week, I watched agog, agape, aghast and ultimately akimbo the worst, most callously cynical exploitation of the most vulnerable, pathetic, spindly sap ever to have a camera hose down his life. Humiliation is just too comfy a word for what happened to a man we shall have to call James, because that’s his real name. James, the 26-year-old virgin, was paraded in front of the nation without pixelation, silhouette, wig, false moustache, actor’s voice-over, his socks, shirt and underpants – or shred of dignity.

Virgin School (Tuesday, Channel 4) took this speccy chap, who lived at home with his dad, had a paper round, shopped with his nan and talked with the nasal whine of the congenitally unlovable, and whisked him to Amsterdam, where three women even Wayne Rooney on the outside of a gallon of Southern Comfort would have had trouble fancying ran what the Dutch call a new-age relationship therapy centre. “Here we see James having his first-ever assisted orgasm,” said the narrator, hardly believing his luck. That made two of them. Well, three of us, actually. The counsellor said James suffered from exceedingly low self-esteem. James said he suffered from exceedingly small penis. And obviously the clinical answer to both those conditions is to take all your underpants off (he wore two pairs) and shag a Low Country lady on telly. By the time it was all over, I’d eaten the sofa and one of my fists.

But, you know, after every scrap of ego had been stripped off him, as he stood there naked, both literally and figuratively, there was something heroic about James. Something free, majestic, wise. Ecce homo, I thought. Here is man. Actually, I just made that last bit up. He still looked like an underendowed chump. So, well done, Osca Humphreys, producer-director; respect. This amoral, gratuitous piece of bullying shows you are just made for TV.

It was Virgin Week on Channel 4, which I know sounds like a broadcasting paradox. There was a show called Make Me a Virgin, which, sadly, I missed, but do you think if I sent them the wool, they’d make me one? Then there was Ian Hislop. He wasn’t part of Virgin Week; he was part of Edwardian season, doing Boy Scouts, or, rather, Scouting for Boys (Monday, BBC4). Hislop is good at documentary TV. He has a bright, hobbity enthusiasm and is smarter than he looks, which, frankly, isn’t much of a stretch. He comes from a great tradition of English pamphleteers and iconoclasts who are very eccentric and partial about the bits of the Establishment they want to put on the tumbril and those they want to preserve in aspic. Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was, predictably, a good thing, though very few of today’s scouts were allowed to sully the halcyon, Hentyesque nostalgia for a simpler, stiffer, perter time.

Baden-Powell was truly an odd bod. A populist who liked looking at kids performing, he became the most famous man in the empire overnight after the relief of Mafeking. Any other colonel would have retired to Broadstairs to breed canaries, but B-P’s hobby was open-air eugenics. He created a small, semi-religious, quasi-militaristic after-school club that contained all the seeds not just of fascist youth movements across Europe but also of the cadres of the Cultural Revolution and the stoolie kids of the Stasi.

Hislop pointed out that Baden-Powell addressed problems that are still current today. Well, yes, up to a point; but he didn’t come up with any particularly useful answers after whittling and bob-a-job. Hislop claimed scouting broke down class barriers through taught self-reliance, trust and civic responsibility. What he chose not to share with us was the airy racism that runs through it, which Baden-Powell had picked up from his peripatetic soldiering. It was a really repulsive knapsack of prejudices. I think scouting comes as a bob-a-job lot. You don’t get the knottying without wanting to truss Jews and Indians. The programme was jauntily made and amusing: I hope Hislop got his Bufton Tufton Nostalgia Badge for it.

John Sergeant and Ian Hislop look so much alike, they must be from the same species. Sergeant walked tall on TV again last week. America has Al Gore, with his Inconvenient Truth, but we’ve got John and his Driving Me Crazy (Monday, ITV1), the first of a series that is ITV’s answer to Top Gear, based on the premise that if you can’t compete, you might as well trash the premise. Sergeant was combusting to whinge about 4WDs. He really went for them with all the ire he could muster. It was like watching Mole attack Toad in his big, shiny motor car, poop-poop. He confronted three enthusiasts and the press officer for the motor industry, but what he did mostly was wring his hands, roll his testicular eyes and exclaim: “Horrid, horrid.”

This was a good example of how not to make crusading TV. It was dithery and ineffectual, and Sergeant is by nature and demeanour a nice, polite chap, altogether too decent and deferential to say poop-poop to a Range Rover. The press officer had all the glib, reasonable answers; Sergeant was left with not much more than a suburban snobbery about that “sort of person”. I particularly enjoyed his Goreish eco-aversion therapy, showing recalcitrant drivers a series of film clips of disasters due to their cars’ exhausts. There were floods and storms, parched earth, melting ice, and they all watched in guilty silence, all thinking the same thing: “Christ, if it gets that bad, we’ll probably need a Humvee.”

What on earth came over Panorama (Monday, BBC1)? For as long as anyone under 30 can remember, it’s been choosing the dullest, worthiest subjects – malfeasance in northern planning departments, bad grammar on multilingual NHS brochures. But all of a sudden this week it chose to take on the Scientologists, the most ornery, touchy, vindictive spiritual movement since the Spanish Inquisition. Scientologists bear grudges. They hate it when people use the c-word, so when John Sweeney called them a c**t (I’m not going to write it – I don’t want them after me; they can all be huge c**ts, for all I care), they went spare. It was their overreaction that made the programme, which is a lesson for anyone who wants to retaliate on screen. You will always come off looking worse. For all their media sophistication, the Scientologists don’t understand the first thing about appearing in front of a camera. If they’d said and done nothing, this programme would have been just another Panorama, a liberal-agnostic sneer.

Scientology is no more bonkers than believing in thousands of gods, some of whom have eight arms or elephants’ heads. In fact, it’s no dafter than the metaphysics of anyone’s spiritual belief. They’re not suicide bombers; they’re not circumcising women; they’re not burning nonbelievers out of their houses. The reason Panorama was so fired up about Scientology is that it’s rich and American and attracts celebrities. If its followers were poor, black and anonymous, they’d never have shot a foot of film.

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