As the job description “writer” vanishes from the placement of television, as if it were some arcane heritage discipline, like engraver or postilion, so it is being replaced by new, shiny callings performed by new, shiny people. I’m particularly keen to meet a reality producer. They’re everywhere. I can while away quite a lot of traffic-jam time imagining the complex and delicate life of a reality producer. Sometimes, I hold imaginary job interviews for them. “When did you first become interested in reality? And what made you think of television? How does reality compare with unreality, and how can you tell? Where do you think you’ll be in 10 years’ time?”

The Restaurant has half a dozen of them. I like to imagine them all arguing in the green room – a symposium of Monty Python philosophers. “Call that reality, you neo-Kantian empiricist twit? That’s just a random collection of dystopian occurrences. Get real.” Or perhaps they’re like an ecumenical conclave of outré deities. Gods do move in eccentrically mysterious ways. Take Jesus, for instance. He’s about as likely to return as a carpenter as he is a writer. I expect “reality producer” might be just up his Via Dolorosa.

Of all the ungainly movements God could have gone through, surely none was as inexplicably spavined as calling Johnny Vegas to the priesthood. But, apparently, he did. For a term, Vegas went to a seminary, which is why some Tristram must have kissed himself all over with tongues when he came up with the idea of sending Vegas to visit born-again, fag-damning, foetus-fetishising, Muslim-baiting middle-American Christians, to see if he could find his way back to the path of righteousness. The result was Johnny Vegas’s Guide to Evangelical Christianity(Tuesday, C4).

The only thing weirder than Vegas having vague yearnings of the soul is that American Christians still allow British film crews to come and laugh at them. There must be a waiting list of sneering, ironic, cool documentary-makers queuing up to mock them. But for people who claim to know the exact minute the world started and where everything in it goes, they are fabulously gullible when it comes to Brits bearing video cameras. I suspect the truth is that they just don’t see the joke coming. Catholics and Jews recycle their guilt as humour. Protestants became Protestants so they didn’t have to do guilt; they do blame instead. They have smiling anger and cruise missiles instead of a sense of humour.

The trouble with Vegas’s occasionally touching spiritual journey was that, as he didn’t trust God, we couldn’t trust him. We’re so used to television taking the piss out of Christians that the thought of an alternative comedian being nice to them, or even wanting to be one of them, is beyond the bounds of what’s believable. So it stood to reason that Vegas must have been having a laugh, or he’d found some brilliant acid.

Tristram Hunt got God in a big way last week. If you think of TV historians as being the reincarnations of old pop stars, then, obviously, Simon Schama is Rick Wakeman, Niall Ferguson is any of the Bay City Rollers and David Starkey is Herman of the Hermits. Hunt is David Cassidy, the historian you wouldn’t mind your daughter coming home with. He has a past, but in a nice way. He does happy history –upbeat, polite, washed-behind-the-ears, family-viewing history – and, in The Protestant Revolution (Wednesday, BBC4), he gave us the easy-listening version of Protestantism.

Few movements in history are covered with as much gore, misery, mayhem and sadism as the schism in Christianity, but, thankfully, Hunt made it all sound like the varsity boat race. He speaks in short, mordant sentences that sound as if they might explain everything but, on examination, say virtually nothing at all. This is now the accepted manner of delivering all factual television. It makes everything sound like a cross between a day-to-day diary entry and a fortune cookie. Mix lumpy factoids with sprinkles of postmodern humour and leave the rest to the music, which, in this case, failed to use a single hymn or mention the Wesleys once, but did end up with Catholic sung Mass. Hunt told us that Martin Luther, while in fear of his life, “went as far as growing a false beard”. I’m sorry, how do you grow a false beard? See, what’s amazing isn’t that Luther managed to sprout nylon, but that Hunt’s self-contented, bland mood music of a script didn’t even notice that he was talking bollocks. This was a timely, important and fascinating subject that ran out of runway.

Abigail’s Party is one of the few television plays everyone who saw it remembers as one of the best things ever on the box. It was a comedy that accurately skewered a certain transient type of middle-class snobbery and insecurity, while reducing the well-worn theatrical device of a dinner party to worthless rubble. Very occasionally, a piece of writing takes a subject or a situation and does it definitively – so unrepeatably that it’s salted, barren earth for anyone who comes afterwards. Abigail’s Party did that. Of course, that doesn’t mean idiots won’t come and splash their seed on the stony ground. Hence, The Dinner Party (Sunday, BBC1).

If this is remembered by any of those who had the misfortune to be paralysed from the neck down and therefore unable to change channels, it will be as the most profligate waste of a good cast this year. Rupert Graves may well look back at his grotesque portrayal of an Essex banker as his darkest hour. What Lee Evans will look back and think, I couldn’t say. I never have any idea what he’s thinking when he’s performing, or even what language he’s thinking it in. He seems to be in the middle of evolving from frantic physical comic into some sort of still-undiscovered character actor – but, like that mudskipper thing that’s neither fish nor newt, at the moment he’s not much more than a prop, a bit of scenery with lines.

But the play was the thing – a desperate, unbelievable, dramatically inert bit of third-degree embarrassment; secondhand agitprop cliché that would have shamed a drama-GCSE improv class. Not a single word or emotion or reaction was honest or believable or real. Again, I’m speechless with admiration for the Tristram who has been paid money, fed lunch and given a chair that goes up and down and has such insouciant confidence in the idiocy of his audience that he allowed this to be broadcast. And not just cast, but cast with good actors who had agents who suffered the same effortless belief and said: “Do it. Who cares? It’s cash.” Finally, and most awe-inspiringly, that someone sat down at a keyboard, tapped away and made The Dinner Party – a crippling, dribbling, mewling homunculus of plagiarism. And, having done it, they didn’t turn white and book themselves into an ashram. They said: “This is cool. I’ll show it to the grown-ups”, and pressed Send. The next time this writer sees his or her name in print, I abjectly pray it’s under “Employee of the month” at Burger King.

Some of you may have noticed that Alan Yentob couldn’t be here for this review, but he’s kindly sent a wink and a nod.

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