And then there were none. Big Brother staggered over the line last week. Did you notice? Very few did. Channel 4 put on a thin smile to go with the thin ratings and said it had no plans to dump the show. It may be expensive, repetitive, vacuous, as tedious as being a security guard in Mothercare, morally indefensible, artistically laughable and a humiliating waste of time for any intelligent grown-up to be involved with, but still it attracts a worthwhile audience of barely pubescent children, which advertisers in particular seem to enjoy.

So there you have it. Big Brother: not actually made for the audience, but made for the advertisements. Nice. Big Brother desperately needs to be put in Room 101. And, instead of trying to manipulate imbeciles for the entertainment and manipulation of other imbeciles, they might like to try telling stories using actors. Kids seem to like that.

At the moment, the heavy mantle of youth entertainment rests on the sloping shoulders of Nicholas Hoult, the About a Boy boy from Skins, who took the lead in Coming Down the Mountain (Sunday, BBC1). Hoult has two significant handicaps as an adolescent actor. The first is that he has to perform from behind a very handsome face. There are dozens of good-looking boys being turned out weekly by the performing arts schools, all getting to do a turn on Hollyoaks, but they look as similar as toothpaste. This one has a singular and diverting appearance, a little satyr who’s lost the address of a bacchanal, grabbed from a Poussin. His face makes promises his gawky, line-swallowing performances can’t keep.

The second is that he’s plagued by interior monologues. Like some maudlin, mooning schizophrenic, he has to look pained while the recording of his voice fills us in with plot points and overwritten rifts of whimsy. Adolescents are particularly prone to the syrup of interior monologue. They’re a symptom of angst, as is the long musical interlude, with which Coming Down the Mountain was also replete. We were supposed to guess at the turmoil beneath the surface, helped by some soulful plunking, which presumably was also going on in the poor kid’s head.

Despite all the well-ploughed furrows of postHolden Caulfield cliché, Mountain began as a good play about a boy who has to live with not only his own adolescence, but a brother with Down’s Syndrome. It was Rain Man in Matlock. The able kid turned out to be the real victim, his afflicted brother sucking up all the family care and attention. It promised to be a believable tragedy. Then the production bottled out and cobbled together a Disneyfied happy ending that reneged on the dynamic of the plot. Everything was made better by the Down’s brother suddenly revealing a deep understanding, a growing vocabulary and a rough-and-ready philosophy, just like that. Who’d have believed it? Not us. It’s the worst type of patronage to ascribe a special, deeper humanity to the disabled, as if they all have a compensating healing spirituality.

Consenting Adults (Wednesday, BBC4) was another stiffly grey addition to the anniversary of the decriminalising of homosexuality, a milestone that has provided nothing that could be considered remotely gay. It’s as if the change in the law was a worthy invention or discovery, like penicillin or antiseptics. It had a desiccated Charles Dance being Lord Wolfenden, of the famous report. The drama was made up of committee meetings. The whole thing was almost too ponderous and procedural to watch, though the set-dressing was done with a particularly brilliant queer eye for authentic detail and style.

What made it exquisitely funny was how badly everybody smoked; and everybody did. Actors, who were once the role models for cigarettes, simply can’t manage it any more, and when they do, it’s all you can concentrate on. This is such an encouraging sign of the times. Sodomy on television is now commonplace, but lighting up is shockingly distasteful. It’s a measure of how far we’ve come. We don’t celebrate the signing of Magna Carta any more, or habeas corpus, because they’re simply part of who we are.

Just when you thought you couldn’t swallow another soupçon, three new autumnal cookery shows are plonked on the already groaning board. First, the moreish Nigella Express (Monday, BBC2), offering speedy things to do in the kitchen. As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t anything like enough Nigella or voluptuous coquetry on television. She has developed a sort of gastronomic Method preparation, a sort of Stanislavsky cooking. Before our eyes, she becomes the thing she’s making: a slinky-fingered dish of baby squid dipped in mayonnaise, a darkly sumptuous and tempting chocolate mousse, a brazen splayed poussin. Nigella is an ingredient shape-shifter, an organic transformer. One minute, it’s merely bread and butter pudding; the next, it’s the goddess’s heaving breasts.

Sadly, much the same is true of Raymond Blanc to the Manoir Born, the man who brought us the joy of baby vegetables tied up with parsley stalks. He’s now fronting The Restaurant (Wednesday, BBC2), the hospitality version of The Apprentice. He looks and sounds like Peter Sellers crossed with a small carrot, and speaks the sort of effortless accented bollocks you generally find in the mission statements of overpriced menus in country restaurants.

The actual rules and point of this reality show are opaque. Inexplicably, we’re never told how much money the contestants have, how much help or from whom, how many staff – and, despite the new Presbyterian honesty sweeping TV, I don’t believe a single word of any of it. But that doesn’t matter, because I couldn’t care less about any of it, either. Tell you what, I’ll go and review the winner.

Then there’s Marco Pierre White taking over Hell’s Kitchen (from Monday, ITV). For years, he has refused to appear on television, and has lambasted chefs who squirm to get on it to sell books or become famous. I couldn’t understand why he’d decided to take over this thin show. But, after five minutes, I realised what the box had been missing all these years.

Marco is the real deal. He is mesmerisingly, brilliantly Machiavellian. The camera completely gets the intense point of him. Gordon Ramsay, by comparison, is a mere pantomime villain. Marco is Faust’s Mephistopheles. This is still a silly fast-food format, where the contestants are mere artificial additives and Angus Deayton an artificial colouring with E-number gags. But it doesn’t matter, because all you want to watch is Marco. And you can get a glimmer of the faintest hint of brimstone and gravy, and understand why almost everybody cooking serious food in this country came through this sort of training in his kitchen. He is the mercurial daddy.

If Channel 4 is casting around for a new teenage format to take over from Big Brother, there’s a Japanese one that might do. A dozen contestants locked in a room drink eight pints of lager; the last one to wet themselves wins. That seems to tick all the boxes.

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