"This series is about the most powerful idea that has ever occurred to a man,” Richard Dawkins says, standing on a windswept promontory.

Of course, I feel like I have, actually, already watched a programme based on the most powerful idea that has ever occurred to man. It was MTV1's Totally Scott-Lee in which Lisa Scott-Lee, formerly of Steps, promised - PROMISED - to leave showbusiness for ever if her next single didn't go Top Ten. My friends, that single - released after ten weeks of dancing, dieting, crying, and the spray-tanning of her actual soul - went in at a mere No13. It was a true moment in history.

But Dawkins is not up on a windswept bluff to talk about Totally Scott-Lee. Indeed in many ways, he is eager to discuss something that is the polar opposite of Totally Scott-Lee - evolution.

“Over the next six weeks, I'm going to show you how evolution offers a far richer and more spectacular vision of life than any religion,” Dawkins intones, as the sea rolls in behind him, portentously.

For those who believe that television should, ideally, consist of 80 per cent eminent academics delivering stirring treatises on their given subjects, and 20 per cent re-runs of classic Daffy Duck, this is a cheering sight. Six weeks of Dawko! Getting into the boxing ring with God, and using Darwin as some manner of clawhammer! Get in there, son!

The first episode of The Genius of Charles Darwin is, ostensibly, Dawkins easing into things slowly. It begins as a fairly straightforward, vanilla bio-doc on Darwin: Dawkins is off around Darwin's old stomping grounds, checking out his stuffed pigeon collection, reading through his notebooks, quoting Darwin's self-assessment that he was “a machine for grinding out theories from an assemblage of facts”.

Darwin had originally intended to become an Anglican minister. Dawkins is deft at sketching the unique socio-political dilemma of someone who realises his destiny is, ultimately, to be The Man Who Killed God. In a cool piece of understatement, Darwin wrote that he understood how “upsetting” his theory would be to many. And, indeed, still is. We all know that “those Americans” are a bunch of Bible-waving, feral creationists - only 14 per cent believe in a fully Godless evolutionary theory. Ten minutes in, however, Dawkins drops in the fact that four in ten Britons believe in creationism, too. So much for our superior, educated, European ways.

I suppose it's such statistics that inform not only the second, more impassioned half of the show, but also the most divisive aspect of Dawkins himself. My atheist friends and I regularly come to blows over Dawkins. “When he gets angry and polemical, he's just as intransigent as the religions he has a go at,” the “Calm Down Dawko” contingent insist.

But me - I like him for that. I think that's his best bit. I love the irony that one of our foremost evolutionary rationalists is, underneath it all, a pop-eyed hellfire preacherman, I think we have a need in our collective psyche for someone railing at us from a pulpit on our weakness and iniquity, and Dawkins fills that role perfectly. I love it when he turns into Nick Cave, and starts his testifying. Twenty minutes into The Genius of ... and Dawkins, ostensibly under the guise of chronicling Darwin's pivotal trip to Kenya, is describing the natural world, Dawkins-style.

“It's hard to comprehend just how much suffering there is in the natural world,” Dawkins says, at the dead of night, eyes glowing night-vision green. “In the minutes while I say these words, millions of animals are running in fear of their lives, whimpering with fear. They are feeling teeth sink into their throats. They are injured. Starving. Or feeling parasites, rasping away from within. There is no central authority. There is no safety net. Animal life is about suffering, survival and death.”

He's like Amos Starkadder, MA, D.Phil, FRS, FRSL. I love it.

Next week - further amplifying Dawkins's paradoxically biblical mien - The Genius of ... examines the post-Selfish Gene world. Over images of yuppies, genocide and reality TV, Dawkins explains how his own theories have been used “to justify terrible atrocities”.

I'm hoping that he concludes that show with: “The end of all flesh is come before me. For the Earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold - I will destroy them,” then blows up the Thames Barrier.

The Genius of Charles Darwin, Mon, C4, 8pm

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