This week marks the 60th anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan: the birth of two nations, the genesis of the world’s largest democracy, “At the midnight hour, when the world sleeps . . . ” and all that.

The BBC has responded with a season of programmes on television and radio commemorating these momentous events, but these have clearly raised problems. We are not just remembering two births, but also a death and an acrimonious divorce. True, the British Empire limped along for a few more decades, but when India went the heart was torn out of it.

BBC Two has already looked at the twilight of Empire with the wonderfully revealing The Last Days of the Raj.Since many of the elderly contributors were children at the time, there was a lot of “we always had three punkawallahs each for tiffin which was frightfully jolly!”, but the series was stuffed with insights intothe psychology and bafflingly complex social relations of British rule. BBC Four has already screened Bombay Railway, a riveting portrait of the world’s most crowded mass-transit system.

The messy divorce is covered next week in The Day India Burned: Partition, a chilling account of the mass migrations and massacres that followed the decision to give way to pressure from Muslim leaders, terrified their people would be oppressed in a Hindu-dominated India, and create a separate Muslim state. More than a million people were slaughtered by their former neighbours, or crammed on refugee trains crawling in both directions towards borders still being drawn up by a British civil servant.

Could the catastrophe have been avoided? The programme doesn’t answer that question, though several contributors agree that Mountbatten’s apparently capricious decision to leave several months before the original schedule poured petrol on the flames. There is something deeply ignominious, too, about the hasty withdrawal of British troops, leaving the few who remained almost powerless in the face of the mounting communal violence.

But, in general, the BBC seems to have decided that most viewers will know almost nothing about the sub-continent and that what we really want is a set of lavishly illustrated coffee-table books. Actually we get three big glossy sets, so it’s like one of those introductory offers from a book club. Sign up for India with Sanjeev Bhaskar and Ganges and we’ll send you all six parts of The Story of India with Michael Wood, absolutely free!

The first two of these series are wonderful to look at, but both manage to be rather irritating. Bhaskar’s Indiahas a breezy superficiality and repeatedly avoids difficult questions. Ganges is simply stunning, one of the finest efforts of the finest TV natural history unit in the world.

Michael Woods’s historical overview was still in the edit at the time of writing, but unless he has undergone a radical personality transplant, I know I will watch it with a mixture of fascination and grinding teeth. The series will be dense with information; the photographers will have a field day with the sunsets over ancient ruins and colourful, crowded bazaars. But Woods is the mannered maestro of hushed awe. He’s forever going on “journeys” or “quests” in search of something or other, implying that he’s discovering everything as he goes along, when you know perfectly well the whole thing has been meticulously planned in advance and that Woods knew all the answers before he started.

There seems to be a rule that if TV critics complain about a developing trend, it must be pursued with renewed vigour out of sheer spite. The transformation of the former Python Michael Palin into a TV traveller has been one of the most successful self-reinventions of our age. But when Five sent Paul Merton to do China, people asked why. Unlike Palin, he didn’t seemed to be gripped by wanderlust and he wasn’t funny either.

Undaunted, the BBC sent Victoria Wood around the former Empire, for no better reason than her sharing her forename with the queen-empress. That decision attracted criticism, too, so it was probably compulsory that India had to be presented by a comic, and who better than the archetype of the good-humoured, liberal-minded British Asian? At least we’ve been spared “Bangladesh with the Chuckle Brothers” – so far. Perhaps it stems from a patronising assumption that we viewers won’t be comfortable watching alien cultures unless we have a familiar, jolly figure holding our hands and muttering, “Ooh! That’s a bit funny, isn’t it?”

Bhaskar always comes across as an extremely nice chap. It is useful that he speaks Hindi, and the purpose of this series is to show the remarkable changes that have transformed the country since independence.

But the commentary constantly teeters on the edge of “India! Land of contrasts!” travelogue clichés. It is so busy being upbeat that the section on booming Bombay fails to mention that half the city’s population still live in squalid slums. One fleeting sequence in a struggling fishing village ends with the poverty-stricken inhabitants silhouetted against a picturesque sunset, to the accompaniment of soulful music. In a later programme Bhaskar spends a happy day with a jolly maharaja who extols the virtues of heritage and cultural tradition, before visiting a “barefoot college” where women are struggling to bring basic education to the poorest villagers and beginning to erode the ferocious iniquities of the caste system.

Even with these caveats, though, this season has to be highly recommended. If the presentation were twice as inane or breathily reverential, it would still be packed with eye-opening marvels, like the sub-continent itself, and never, ever dull.

One of the biggest surprises is the two-part Saira Khan’s Pakistan Adventure. Presented by a former Apprentice contestant, it sounds capable of approaching the nadir that was Peaches Geldof’s abysmal nonexploration of Islam. In fact, the opposite is true. There are a few coffee-table shots, but the young Nottingham-raised businesswoman, whose parents came from Kashmir, is fascinated and troubled by the varieties of Islamic culture and belief in what might have been her native land. She homes in on the toughest issues, sometimes with considerable courage, marvelling at a Sufi festival, delving into the shadow world of the transsexual hijras, visiting the one refuge for 1,500 battered women in Karachi and finding solace in the female-friendly calm of Shah Jehan’s mosque in Thatta. It is a bold, honest and often moving piece of work.

India with Sanjeev Bhaskar, Mon, BBC Two, 9pm; Saira Khan’s Pakistan Adventure, Tues, BBC Two, 9pm; Ganges, Fri, BBC Two, 9pm

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette