Pancake Intellect. It's a term, usually derogatory, that evolutionary psychologists are increasingly using to describe the shifting nature of contemporary human intelligence, especially in the West, as it becomes ever more embedded in the search engines, free-roaming capabilities and sprawling accessibility of the all-powerful internet. In other words, our knowledge, like the proverbial pancake, has become worryingly thin, but spread out over an enormous terrain of subjects.

Last night's TV was a pancake orgy. It kicked off with Martin Clunes: A Man and His Dogs, a programme so lacking in focus on its central canine subject that it might have been simply called, Dogs: What Are They Like? Here the actor and comedian Clunes, a self-confessed dog obsessive (Dog fancier is too tame - this is a man who referred, deadpan, to his black labrador Arthur as, “The son I've never had.”), boldly opened the show, and set the remit for the next hour's entertainment, with the defining doggy question: “But where did they actually come from?” What?! That's like saying “Elephants, what are they made of?” or “Snakes, why are they here?”

Needless to say (pancake alert), this was merely an excuse for Clunes to jet off to the Rocky Mountains, to the Australian Outback and to wildest Dorset to meet various wolf, dingo and doggy experts who told him things such as: “Dinky the Dingo's pack instinct does not exclude human beings,” while he, in turn, informed us (pancake alert) that there are 1.2 million puppies born every day, there are 7 million dogs in Britain, and more than 400 different dog breeds currently in existence. In doing so Clunes had become his own internet metaphor, a title search, or a hyperlink on a webpage, pinging us around the planet and annals of canine history under the impossibly vague heading, “Dogs”.

Of course, Clunes wasn't just a metaphor. He was cheeky, chirpy, and only occasionally creepy (see “son” comment above). And, boy does he love his dogs. “They're like little people!” he cooed in the opening moments. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” he cried, in ecstasy, when he saw wild wolves. “I desperately wanted her to come and nuzzle me,” he confessed, after watching a semi-feral she-wolf cuddle with Sean Ellis, a Bon Jovi-u-like animal behaviourist. Clunes closed the show promising us that the second episode would ask the pivotal question (pancake alert) “Why has the relationship between man and dog endured?”

Equally spurious, however, was the final episode of Britain from Above. Though not quite a full pancake (it was more a large piece of French toast), it dealt with as many geographical banalities and generalities as it could squeeze under the episode title Untamed Britain. Thus poor old Andrew Marr, who had literally become a human cursor whizzing over a Google map of the country, strapped himself into a microlite and barked melodramatic hyperbole such as, “We think of this country as having a genial, almost cosy landscape. And yet [dramatic pause], all around us there are great forces at work!” Needless to say, a whirlwind tour (pancake alert) of Skye, Loch Ness, St Austell, Co Tyrone and Norfolk revealed that these great forces were, in fact, wind, rain, tidal erosion and continental drift. Which ultimately meant, well, nothing.

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