I have spent the past fortnight in America, immersed, or submerged, in rolling news. There is something numbly comforting about the repetitious lapping of CNN. They say that, after the initial gagging and panic, drowning is quite a pleasant way to go, and that’s rather like watching Fox News — as you drift into unconsciousness, other people’s lives flash before your eyes. The rolling news channels give you the impression of being constantly informed while actually telling you very little. The world sidles past like a great river, and you never have to get wet. Disasters and basketball matches, comic animals and those strangely misshapen commentators all float away with equal inconsequence.

I was reminded again of two strange truths about American broadcasting. One is the astonishing number and variety of snake-oil medicinal commercials, not just advertising patent medicines but whole new diseases. Medical care is one of the main broken bones of contention in the coming American election, but nobody has actually pointed out that getting the halt, the flatulent, the palsied, the breathless and the hypochondriacs to pay for television is a very weird way of financing the entertainment and gaiety of a nation.

The other thing that struck me was how terribly ugly and uninviting the design of television channels is. It’s not something we generally think about here until the BBC comes up with a new and hideously expensive station ident — synchronised hippos or wheelchair water polo. But you have no idea how good the architecture and soft furnishing of our broadcasting is until your eyes have been exhausted from watching American TV. It’s so crass and clunky, confusing and hectoring. One of the consequences of this cut-and-paste design is boxed sets of TV series. Nobody guessed they would be so popular or lucrative, but it’s so much nicer to watch television with all the television taken out.

Our own dear familiar box seems so much more substantial and smarter, and we have something the Yanks can’t match — Joanna Lumley. They’ve nothing as beautifully designed: functional and jaunty; elegant without being flashy; a triumph of British engineering. Ten years ago, I started a public appeal asking for names of people who appeared on television and were universally loved. So far, only two have passed without being blackballed: David Attenborough and Joanna Lumley. This week, Lumley was performing the part that suits her best: being Joanna Lumley. In In the Land of the Northern Lights, she was off to the far north of Norway to search for the elusive aurora borealis, spurred on by a childhood book about a penguin. On such nebulous whims are TV journeys begun.

One of the myriad joys of Lumley is that she can produce and prestidigitate that most vacuous and formless of light entertainments: whimsy. This programme blissfully took it to new soaring heights of mellifluous grandeur. Her breathy voice, her childlike enthusiasm and stoutly prewar good sense allowed her to create great glowing curtains of sparkling whimsy right across the screen that defied the cruel heat of cynicism. “The northern lights are a fickle lady. They don’t appear for everyone,” she said. “You mustn’t wave at them or whistle at them.” In fact, they are a rather good metaphor for Lumley herself. The programme, it must be said, was rather faint and fragile and almost borealis, but all was winning and rather beautiful, both corporeally and ethereally.

If Lumley stands at one end of TV escapism, then Charley Boorman is about as far to the other as you could get. For his latest trip, Ireland to Sydney by Any Means, he has dumped Obi-Wan Kenobi and is travelling with only a film crew for company. Why, you may ask. The answer is: God alone knows.

He doesn’t seem to. It’s the wrong question. How, is what we’re supposed to inquire. By any means possible, Charley giggles in reply, and so we are jerked through an obsessive and torturous series of vehicles — bikes, buses, cars, boats, and no doubt we’ll get the full range of camels, rickshaws, skateboards and piggybacks before he’s finally filmed doing the thumbs up outside Sydney Opera House.

Now, I must admit to being unmoved by the excitement of the first two series. I find motorbikes silly, dangerous, ugly and dull. And although Boorman is a winningly excitable chap, his constant Tiggerish boisterousness would make me want to shoot him before we got to Calais; the thought of his gurning optimism leering out of the screen halfway round the world is really more than I can stomach. That and the constant braying laugh, like someone trying to kick-start his head. It is a noise that is a symptom not of hilarity, but of nothing else to say. More importantly, there is a hint — well, more than a hint — of naked product placement. The first episode was replete with logos and enthusiastic encomiums for various bits of kit. They went out of their way to fit in yet more products. Is that how the lavish trip is paid for? As with the other two adventures, I got the feeling that our role as an audience was to be the patsies who pay for a lad’s lark and a nice little earner. Well, good luck to Charley, but he’ll be making the trip without me.

Other People’s Breast Milk is one of those Daily Mail titles that has you reaching — or retching — for the remote. Anything to do with other people’s bodily fluid is a good reason to go to the cinema. This personalised documentary was broadly about women who breast-feed other women’s babies, which Kate Garraway tried to make sound contentious, although wet-nursing is hardly new or rare, and I never discovered why she wanted to make this programme in the first place. She didn’t have an opinion, one way or another, about anything at all, just a lot of skimmed feelings and a little queasiness; a mild disapproval. It was a programme without any purpose except to flaunt a titillating headline.

We were introduced to an odd woman who had flown to southern Sudan to breast-feed starving Dinka babies. By chance, I happened to be there when she did it, and I can tell you it was one of the most disgustingly tasteless acts of postcolonial patronage and exhibitionism. This film dribbled to an end with Garraway trying to convince her husband to try strawberries and breast-milk cream. He turned out to be Derek Draper. Those of you with long memories will remember him as a key player in the very first Blair scandal. He boasted of being able to arrange favourable meetings with cabinet ministers. He is now a psychotherapist, so presumably can arrange favourable meetings with your id. He refused the breast milk, saying memorably: “I don’t eat bits of women.” Oh dear, poor Garraway.

Just when I thought I’d lost the knack of laughing at intentionally humorous TV, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse have returned with a new old show, Harry & Paul, which raised wheezing middle-aged sniggers. I particularly enjoyed Clarkson Island, a homage to Monty Python’s Whicker Island. “What was that terrible noise?”, the other half of my bed asked. “Only me laughing, dear,” I said. “Well, don’t do it again. Watch that woman get her tit out. What’s it called?” Derek Draper. “Oh yes, and what’s the other one called?”

In the Land of the Northern Lights (BBC1, Sunday)

Ireland to Sydney by Any Means (BBC2, Sunday)

Other People’s Breast Milk (Channel 4, Tuesday)

Harry & Paul (BBC1, Friday)

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