Sorry, I was away last week. Yet again, I’ve missed the television festival in Edinburgh. Damn, damn, damn, damn. That’s a whole decade in which I’ve been unable to make it to the riveting clan gathering of MacTristram. Every year, someone perky and lively called something like Perky Ann Lively phones and asks if I’ll be coming to Edinburgh to take part in a panel discussion entitled Critics: Whining Egocentric Parasitic Tasteless Morons or Wannabe Reality-Show Contestants? I did go once. I was a new boy, and keen. I thought it only fair I should show up for free and frank discussions with the thin-skinned, infantile, bitter vanity boxes who make television. You have no idea what concentrated venom feels like until you’ve walked through the bar of the George Hotel in Edinburgh at 11pm with 500 assorted TV purveyors giving you the evils.

This year, I see I’ll be missing a discussion called F*** Off, I’m a TV God, about change-the-world formats. I bet that ends up as a new series on E4. I’m particularly sorry not to have made it for The Making of Robin Hood: A Masterclass, and Merton, Widdecombe and Sweeney... Is This the Future of Current Affairs? No, but it could be a quiz show along the lines of QI. Then there was a session called Smells Like Teen Spirit. Does anyone know what teenagers want to watch? Being unavoidably detained in Siena with a lot of teenagers last week, I happened to ask them what they had on their series-link Sky+ systems. Quite a lot, as it turned out: The Shield, Prison Break, Entourage, Grey’s Anatomy, House, Shark, The Wire, every variation of the CSI franchise, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. You will notice that these programmes have one thing in common: they’re all American. There wasn’t a single home-grown programme. They were too old for Doctor Who and not old enough for the Saga round-Britain programmes that are the vogue at the moment.

In terms of serial dramas, cops and docs and romcoms, America is streets ahead of what’s being made for young adults here. Once upon a time, we used to boast the best television in the world, the sort most people want to watch. That’s no longer true. America, on the other hand, once produced fine documentaries, but rarely does any more. So I was surprised to find God’s Warriors (Wednesday-Friday, CNN), three long documentaries, presented by Christiane Amanpour, each exploring fundamentalism among Jews, Muslims and Christians respectively – or, rather, disrespectively.

CNN and Amanpour can command access to people most other producers couldn’t touch. What we were offered was an interesting mix of the great and the good, the great and the ghastly, the expert and the very ordinary who are neither great nor expert nor ghastly, just angry and sad and victimised. These well-made, humane films with annoying American-news soundtracks were particularly interesting because the Christian right in America was observed in the same breath as jihadists and Zionist settlers. The God squad won’t have liked being compared to the Muslim Brotherhood. Overall, the tone was liberal and respectfully secular, though the Christian programme, being wholly American, was rather parochial and not as compelling as the other two.

In the end, I was thoroughly depressed, not simply by the blind power of fundamentalism, which, despite its noise and vehemence and occasional nihilistic viciousness, is actually strangely ineffective and halfcocked, but by the fact that spirituality has shifted from being something that is personal and improves us as individuals to being an excuse to behave appallingly. Amanpour was born in Iran, a Shi’ite country, was brought up a Catholic and is married to a Jew. She is particularly well qualified, personally and professionally, being by far the best gentle but insistent interviewer of everyone from children to presidents in televised current affairs. And, though the script sometimes lapsed into American journalese cliché, it was always incisive and inquisitive. I should confess that Amanpour is a godparent to one of my sons.

Now, from the wide-eyed and open-handed to the tunnel-visioned and clenched John Pilger, a man who, like Miss Bloomer, Mr Crapper and the Earl of Sandwich, has donated his name for the greater understanding of mankind. Pilgerism: a particularly monotonous, self-righteous, partial and ism-bound view of the world, posing as journalism. Almost everything God’s Warriors attempted to be, The War on Democracy (Monday, ITV1) failed at, or couldn’t be bothered to try. Pilger’s journalistic compass is set by the position of America: wherever that is, he swings the other way. So, based on the sound principle of my enemy’s enemy is my friend, he set about an obscenely embarrassing tongue-bath of Hugo Chavez, the megalomaniac president of Venezuela.

Pilger’s interview technique is not to have any technique visible. He listens to himself asking questions that include answers, then to little else. He picks through the wreckage of people’s misfortune, gleaning shards of proof to complement his mosaic ideology, while dismissing and discarding anything that could be a contradiction. This relentless film looked like Brezhnev-era Soviet propaganda. The irony is that underneath all the Dave Spartism, there is a good story for a committed documentary-maker. But Pilger is so plainly grinding axes that he’s just too easy to resist. He has grown decidedly vain on camera. I couldn’t help noticing that the flowing white locks have been ever so carefully coiffed with an exaggerated swagger, setting off his tan, and it came to me who he has become: a cross between Arthur Scargill and Donald Trump, with just a hint of Pol Pot.

In previous series, I’ve had some quite Stone Age things to say about Bruce Parry in Tribe (Tuesday, BBC2), the Glastonbury version of Ray Mears. His gung-ho Edwardian skinny-dipping into other people’s delicate lives, as if they were a Thorpe Park ride or an army assault course, is an insidious form of colonial patronage posing as one-world togetherness. I watched the first of this new series with my teenage daughter, and she loved it, thought his learning to hunt with the Brazilian Matis tribe was exciting and informative. And, I must say, there was a much greater sense of humility and anthropology and just plain good manners in this programme than usual. It was less about endurance and more about understanding.

Maybe I’m getting soft, but in the end I rather warmed to the Notting Hill Livingstone as he puked his unsavoury lunch for the umpteenth time and our edification. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that they make up the inevitable initiation rituals for bets. “I bet we can get him to eat a slug, then whip him and roll him in pig muck and make him sing dirty songs.” “He’ll never fall for that.” “Bet he does – and he’ll do it naked, with a stinging-nettle codpiece. Have you ever seen a television?” “No.” “Well, they’ll do anything.” Initiation ceremonies may well be the prehistoric version of The X Factor.

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