My father’s favourite old German saying was: “If we do as our fathers did, we don’t do as our fathers did.” I pass this on to you in the spirit of he who passed it on to me. As far as I can divine, it means that to continue with traditions, reenactments, revivals and doing things because that’s the way they’ve always been done is never to be like the original, because, by its very nature, that won’t be original.

The original documentary series called The Family has become a template for a whole television genre. It is credited with - or blamed for, depending on whether you make them or watch them - being the Abraham of reality television. It wasn’t, and its brilliant but tormented director, Paul Watson, is constantly having to disown vicious, peeping-tom little bastards that claim him as their father.

The difference is all in the intention.

Watson uses the camera to give access to those who are inarticulate or marginalised. He gives the dismissed dignity and the overlooked a voice. The Family wasn’t just an ordinary family examined in the Petri dish of television: it was a family that was shown to be as extraordinary and original as any of us. It wasn’t knocking common folk: it revealed that there was no such thing as common folk.

The latest version of The Family is not the same. It is not the same because a reproduction Georgian house is not a Georgian house. We can’t unsee or unknow all the vast, sweaty miles of reality television we’ve been subjected to, all those life swaps and wife swaps, the makeovers and love islands and celebrity jungles. Now, when we see the genre on the box, we make assumptions, we’re ahead of the camera, we’ve seen it all before. It isn’t possible to view television’s version of reality without cynicism or prurience.

The new revival family, it must be said, does look very entertaining, very all-of-us; middle-class, full of angst and conflict, lovable but flawed. One of the things that has grown more sophisticated and manipulated is the casting of “real” people. So many have been used that there is now a whole industry of casting agents who have found precisely the right tint of reality to look for. This family is polished and perky in a damaged, scuffed sort of way. The cameras are CCTV-like, as in Big Brother. They miss nothing, hear everything and quietly make their judgments.

In reality TV, editing is everything: what you leave out is as important as what you leave in. The box has a craving for a narrative. So, with the best will in the fishbowl world, it imposes stories, a sense of morality and destiny, and on random episodes it makes or implies judgment. None of this is what it feels like to live a real life; that’s added later in the cutting room, along with the music. The trailer for this series implied that the audience would be watching to glean insights into themselves, that the editorial purpose was empathy. That might have been true of the original, but it’s not true now. This isn’t a bad show, these aren’t bad people, it’s just that the whole thing has become a bad idea and a bad place to be.

The best thing that can be said about Tess of the D’Urbervilles is that it’s miserable - deeply, unrelentingly, irredeemably, morbidly miserable, a mordant story of snobbery, social climbing, rape, debauchery, lies, lust and morris dancing. What it’s mostly about, though, is pastoral patronage, that and landscape molesting. Hardy is the great countryside fiddler, a rampant agrophile, a man who couldn’t see a field without wanting to dribble over it and make a girl weep in it. He has been awarded the greatest honour available to an Englishman of letters: a lump of sheep shit and mud has been named after him, Hardy Country. Although Hardy wrote sticky prose about the Dorset topography, he remained tactfully aloof from its inhabitants, a zoologist recording an endangered species. For the lives he told of had already vanished by the time he got round to writing about them.

This adaptation is as grimly languorous and glum as he was. It’s a sensitive and authentic reproduction of the pretty, pouty Tess. She is not a great part for a modern actress - one of literature’s relentless victims, punished for her beauty, used by every man that comes into contact with her, not least Hardy, who never gave his women the dignity of a happy ending or even a weekend break in Tenerife. But the countryside looks lovely. The star of this series is the location scout. The lingering longing for a defunct landscape seems to make the callous treatment of Tess all the worse.

The other adaptation of the week was Merlin, though it was not so much an adaptation as a manifestation. This has precious little to do with Le Morte d’Arthur; instead, it tries to do for the young magician what TH White did for young Arthur in The Sword in the Stone: that is, give him a back story and a rollicking explanatory childhood. It is also an attempt to cash in on the unexpected success of Robin Hood and fill the screen with fit young adolescent boys, none of whom can act anything but painful gaucheness. Then again, agonised gaucherie is a winning look on a good-looking boy. The box has discovered a large untapped audience that yearns for Abercrombie & Fitch drama, all out-of-focus sexiness and romance in fantasy settings for gangs of intense kids having adventures involving lots of chaste flirting and bloodless heroics.

Merlin is a magic-realist version of a 14-year-old’s geography field trip. This trainee-costume-drama, kid-lite show is to get them ready for a life of Sundays spent swooning over the Austen-Brontës. Actually,I prefer this version. It’s spongy, bland, toothless, twee and doesn’t do tongues, but I know that, out there, there are girls on mobiles saying: “Oh my God, did you see him when he looked sort of embarrassed? He was so gorgeous. Oh my God.”

Finally, Jonathan Freedland presented President Hollywood, an essay that tried to prove the American presidential election was, in fact, an adaptation of The West Wing, a series that, with Nostradamus-like perception, had already shown us a young, inspiring, ethnic Democrat running against an avuncular, old, decent Republican. I don’t understand why Freedland thought this was surprising. Everything grows to be like its celluloid image - doctors, policeman, barristers, teachers and delinquents have all morphed into their fictional selves. Why shouldn’t politicians, the most insecure, people-pleasing, chameleon profession of them all? All political speech-writers want to be Hollywood scriptwriters. All elections are storyboarded, given a narrative, the contestants auditioned and chosen for their looks, back story and appeal to the audience.

The problem with the elections in this country is that we’ve never been able to make a decent and admirable role model for a prime minister, so they all end up looking and sounding more or less like Rory Bremner. Except for poor Gordon Brown, who has become Jude the Obscure - and that didn’t end happily, either.

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