Is there no end to the classic serial? Will nobody rid the box of the wringing snobbery of all this literary kitsch? I say one nice thing about Cranford and they’re all over the living room like hawks in bonnets.

“Oh, Mama, may we please, please go? I could wear the Chinese taffeta.”

“Hester, put the peonies in a vase.

We’ll dine on the mutton.”

“Ma’am, by my troth, there is nothing that so snugly fits my prospect as your Fanny.”

These people, they’re like cultural lice. Last week’s offering was Sense and Sensibility(Tuesday, BBC1), written by one of those shrew women who have heritage-trail gingerbread and chintz named after them. It’s about – well, you know what it’s about. It’s what they’re all always about: selling teenage virginity for cash and crenellations. The most astute deconstruction of every plot nuance and character trait in the Austen or Brontë novel can be found in Noel Edmonds’s Deal or No Deal?.

In this case, a widowed mother and her three daughters find themselves in reduced circumstances and fret terribly about whose box to open and what on earth they’re going to do with themselves. “Get a f***ing job,” a million viewers shouted at the unheeding screen. You’re strapping girls – go and do something productive and useful instead of spending the entire day sitting about like empire-line fungus, sighing and preening and self-obsessing and wondering if you can make your hymen stretch over 11,000 acres and 20 grand a year. Nobody with a surname in Austen country has ever had a job. Nobody does anything except not eat meals, leave cards, walk aimlessly, not read books in arbours and twist their limbs elegantly. They have the least possible fun at dances and, finally, marry a house with a view. Why does anyone think watching this is an enjoyable way to waste an hour?

And why is it that anyone who cares about their craft wants to make these programmes? The only faintly redeeming feature of Sense and Sensibility was the cast, who, as always, were pearls playing swine. Marvellous actors have to deliver stilted, arch and laughably clichéd dialogue. Without hyperbole or contrariness or cussedness, I truly believe that the classic serial is a greater threat to the health of broadcasting than reality-television makeover shows and I’d Do Anything to Be Oliver and/or Nancy with Andrew Lloyd Webber. They are a National Trust cancer; they stifle originality and have led to a smug sterility in drama.

The biggest problem facing all British television is a dearth of good writing, particularly for plays. The raw material of television is the written word. Writers are undervalued, underpaid, overproduced and overedited. Just look at how many programmes don’t even get a writing credit. Even the bloke who is a stand-in for the bloke who’s an assistant to the chap who paints the floor gets a credit. And the reason all the programmes on your Sky+ series link are American, except for Top Gear, is because their writers are better than ours. There are more of them, they are better qualified, they’re much better paid and more highly valued. And Jeremy Clarkson writes Top Gear. Television needs imagination, not adaptation. Sense and Sensibility even featured the traditional shot of a horse and carriage in its opening moments – that’s how blinkered it was to innovation or originality. It’s pathetic, a bigger national shame than our football team, because our television used to be better than our football team.

If they’re not adapting books, the Tristrams are stealing their titles.Three Men in a Boatwas a quaintly and irrationally enjoyable programme a couple of years ago with Griff Rhys Jones, Dara O’Briain and Rory McGrath retracing Jerome K Jerome’s oar strokes. It must have been a success because they’ve decided to do it again, this time on a yacht owned by Rhys Jones in Three Men in Another Boat (Tuesday and Wednesday, BBC2).

The concept of the journey was to sail round the south coast to the Isle of Wight and have a race. Initially, it all seemed to suffer from too much concept, too many ingredients. It’s the curse of reality television that everything must have a reason, a goal and a competition against the clock. But still, boats do contain more comic potential per square foot than any other man-made habitat. All three of them had the loud bonhomie of a reunion that seemed like a good idea right up until the moment they met. It’s difficult to believe that these three would be friends without a television camera present, but then that’s true of almost every coupling on television.

Despite the tweeness, the awkwardness, the absence of humour or excitement or pretty much anything else, it slowly grew to have an inexplicably warm, home-grown charm, rather like sitting in a burst of incontinence, and I rather enjoyed it, probably because I’m getting old and the elastic’s perishing.

The Shadow in the North (Sunday, BBC1) was a follow-up adaptation of Philip Pullman’s pastiche of John Buchan/Arthur Conan Doyle mysteries. Even by the worn-out standards of this genre, it was a stupid story that had all the tension of a sagging tennis racket. A workmanlike cast kicked the deflated plot towards the closing credits with a growing sense of disbelief and disaffection. Not even Billie Piper’s pulchritude could lift it.

A year is a long time to spend with a camera crew. JK Rowling managed it and finished her opus at the same time. She also managed not to tell them anything that we couldn’t have gleaned from the dust jackets of her books or the internet. JK Rowling – A Year in the Life(Sunday, ITV1) was produced and directed by the very capable James Runcie, a nice man who makes solid-oak television programmes of the sort that viewers say: “Wonderful workmanship, last you a lifetime.” But in this instance he has employed an utter duffer to do the interviewing – he’s gone and done it himself. He is a properly ghastly interrogator, too nice and obsequious. The questions came straight from a fanzine quick quiz: what’s your favourite indulgence? If you could be any one of the Spice Girls, which would it be? Though it was short on information, it turned out to be revealing in another way.

Rowling is such an untypical author – or, rather, we are so used to authors being a typical way: armoured with a brittle carapace of intellect, conspicuously well read and abstract. She is none of these: she is without the remotest literary pretension. And whether or not you think her a great or a bad writer, she is undeniably an exceptional one, and seems to prove that writing well or indifferently comes not from intellect or practice or technical aptness or even intelligence, but from how well you manage to access and metamorphose the experience of your life. It was a lesson Mr Runcie might draw succour from.

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