The British are the best in the world at putting on a big state occasion. That’s what everybody says when we troop the colour or marry off one of the royal family. The same is surely true of putting Jane Austen on the television. We’ve had so much practice, you see, at bringing the traditional elements together. Here’s the carriage and pair rolling effortlessly through the country park. Here are the frock-coated servants rolling up the carpet in the ballroom and, of course, here is the ball itself, with the ladies slightly red of cheek and eager with anticipation, and the gentlemen handsome and serious and just the slightest bit dull.

That’s how it was in Miss Austen Regrets (Sunday, BBC1). In fact, the only modern element seemed to be Jane Austen herself - the spiky, independent career woman, dismissive of men because none could match her high standards. She complains of hangovers and is seen, at one point, tottering about in the grounds of her brother’s house with a glass in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other.

Yet the Jane Austen portrayed so brilliantly here by Olivia Williams was hardly a role model for today’s spiky, independent career girls. For all her bravado on the subject, she was obsessed by the one thing that eluded her - Mr Right. It was pretty much all she talked about: partly advising her niece and partly reflecting on her own lack of success.

It was enough to admire the craftsmanship of Miss Austen Regrets: the photography, the costumes, the direction, the acting, everything. Yet, in the end, it told us no more about the main theme than half an hour with Bridget Jones’s Diary. What this Miss Austen’s advice boiled down to was that love is important, and money is important. If a young man can provide both, scoop him up with an ornate silver spoon. If he has only one of these qualities, well, her advice was more ambivalent. Great novelist or not, she would never have cut it as an agony aunt. And, for all her qualities, she remained single because she just wouldn’t take the risk - even though she’d probably have been perfectly happy with Hugh Bonneville, the kindly if rather unimaginative vicar of Ramsgate.

What would Austen have made of Out of the Blue (Monday-Friday, BBC1)? This is the successor to Australian daytime soaps such as Home and Away and Neighbours, but with a modern twist: it is also a murder mystery. We know straightaway that it’s a murder mystery because it opens as schoolfriends gather for a reunion. Nobody gathers old schoolfriends together on television unless one of them is going to die. “I didn’t know in less than 48 hours our lives would be ripped apart,” says Gabby, the narrator. “One of us would be killed.” Well, no, you wouldn’t know that, would you? Not unless you were plotting the murder, Gabby.

The success of a murder mystery depends on how much you care about the characters: does it matter to you which one dies and which one did it? Frankly, if I’d been invited to their barbie on the beach, I’d have eaten the chicken raw and prayed for food poisoning. These so-called close friends seemed to have relationships based entirely on banter and small talk.

“Where were you?” one character asks his brother.

“I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.” Ha! A suspect.

We knew the pair were brothers, by the way, thanks to a previous exchange: “Why’d you do that?” “You’re my brother, you’ve been in Queensland for five months and we’re sharing a room.”

Isn’t that so reminiscent of the scene where Mrs Macbeth asks her husband what he’s been doing upstairs? “I’ve been murdering the old king, dear, having recently been stopped by three old ladies on my way home from fighting the Norwegians and assured that I would soon be king myself. Later in the play, I will lose the plot completely and see the ghost of my good friend Banquo.”

After a while, I checked how long I’d been watching Out of the Blue. It had been going for just 10 minutes, but it felt like days. At one point, Gabby reflects that one of her friends must be the killer. Not necessarily. Anybody who sat through the whole 45 minutes must now be a suspect. Never mind one of them, I wanted to massacre the whole lot.

Perhaps it was the sheer banal awfulness of Out of the Blue that made me look kindly on The Invisibles (Thursday, BBC1). Other people who watched this have first picked up their jaws in disbelief, then fetched out knuckle-dusters and a baseball bat. Granted, it’s not exactly Battleship Potemkin, but, unlike Out of the Blue, its idea of an entertaining line was not: “I might just go to get the salads.” It is set in a small fishing village in Devon, which for me is never a good start. Television is too fond of West Country fishing villages, which producers fondly imagine to be full of eccentrics with accents as thick as clotted cream. Actually, they’re like every other village in rural Britain - full of second homes, probably owned by television producers.

Anyway, Anthony Head and Warren Clarke arrive in this particular village from Spain, where they have been living in retirement after careers as Britain’s top safe-cracker (Head) and expert in burglar alarms (Clarke). It goes without saying that they are forced by circumstance into one last job. It goes without saying that this goes horribly wrong.

Because it stars Head and Clarke, who are normally so reliable, you want The Invisibles to succeed. Yet what is perhaps most horribly wrong is Head as a ruthless gangster. If Graham Norton were cast as Henry VIII, it could not be more wrong. Head might have got away with it as a gentleman thief along the lines of Raffles, or Clouseau’s foe the Phantom, but he should take that south London accent back to the hire shop and ask for his money back.

The Invisibles also has a problem with pace. It wants to emphasise the aches and pains, and the fact that these elderly thieves are not quite as quick as they used to be. But it’s also a farce, which relies on speed. By the end of the first episode, the two crooks have discovered that the oddball landlord of the village pub is the son of a former partner in crime, so they eventually unite as the Three Musketeers of Devon crime. No doubt with hilarious consequences.

Scallywagga (Tuesday, BBC3) is a sketch show that is self-consciously hangin’ in the hood, or wherever. It thinks itself to be young, vibrant, energetic and very much the next big thing. “Strap yourself in for the most explosive sketch-show ride in years,” it boasts. What it actually supplies is a comedy show so traditional, it could have been Dick Emery with the word “innit” tacked onto the end. They set up the scene, they reverse your expectation and they get the laugh. Or not.

It’s full of emos and baseball caps and the other accessories of youth, but the jokes come straight out of the 1970s. An expectant mum goes into labour in the street. “Can I borrow your phone, mate?” asks the father of a passer-by. He then uses it to take her picture. New props, but a gag Benny Hill might have written. It’s almost as if The Office or Little Britain had never happened. Innit.

AA Gill is away

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