If you’re a doctor, people at parties will ask you to fix their embarrassing itches. If you’re a soldier, they’ll ask if you’ve ever killed anyone. Prostitutes get asked if they ever have sales, and we television critics are invariably asked how on earth we can watch all that rubbish when there’s nothing on television. I’ve always considered “nothing on television” the most asinine cultural comment a grown-up can make. There is a multicoloured cacophonous Niagara of stuff pouring out of every screen all day, every day. There are more tellies than people in this country. There are lots of things you could say about television — and I do — but “There’s nothing on” isn’t one of them.

Then last week turned up and my blessed editor said: “It’s a bit of a slack week, I’m afraid. In fact, there’s nothing on television.” Which just goes to show there’s a first time for everything. Never say never. Because, sure as celebrities will perform necrophilic bestial acts on a kangaroo’s bits in the jungle, there will one day be nothing on TV. And last week was it. There was nothing on TV. A few good things were finishing, such as Spooks, The Devil’s Whore and the maudlin brilliance of Wallander, but apart from that, nada. Just so you realise how utterly, echoingly empty the box was, the illustration for this column is the Hairy Bikers. Do you have any idea how far down the cultural-zeitgeist food chain you have to go before you settle for a brace of short-order Hellmann’s angels as the image of the moment?

The absence of anything on television does give me an opportunity to commend a series I’ve been meaning to write about for some weeks. On Sunday evenings, at around bathtime, there has been a beautifully crafted and carefully scripted series of programmes about the natural history of China. I’ve watched it with two wrapped and rapt infants, and every week I think I must mention how very, very good Wild China is, how it’s conjured with all the care and devotion and easily accessible intelligence, the experience and excitement, that makes your TV a treasure. But I never get round to it because there’s always something that needs a damn good thrashing first. And now it’s over.

I was at a party last week and I met a nice man who didn’t say “How can you watch all that rubbish on television, there’s nothing on”, because he ran ITN. I said how much I liked his good news. “Ah, Channel 4 News,” he replied. There is an assumption that people like me — and probably people like you — will naturally like Jon Snow and his open-plan view of the world. Actually, it drives me to distraction. It’s become consistently the most flawed and least successful of all the terrestrial news broadcasts. It can’t keep its partiality in its pants. It’s constantly letting us know what it thinks and how it feels. I’m always aware of being winked at, being included in some assumed, clubbable liberal orthodoxy.

Here’s one small but not insignificant example: Krishnan GuruMurthy interviewing the leader of the BNP about their leaked membership list. It was tough questioning, which was fine, but at the end he didn’t thank the guy. Now, they thank everyone, good, bad and ugly. It’s a small politeness, a civility that makes no judgment. In not offering it to the BNP, Guru-Murthy ditched the programme’s impartiality, which is the most important and powerful point of news reporting. No editor should have allowed it and no reporter should have traded in his obligation to be even-handed and opinion-free to make such a petty point.

A girl from The Guardian who was listening to this conversation stood back aghast and, with a wide-eyed surprise that implied she’d only been on this world for a day, said: “Oh my God, you really are like your column.” And whose column did you suppose I should be like?

An Independent Mind was a collection of snapshots from the lives of people around the world who have stood up to and been squashed by totalitarian governments. There was an Ivorian reggae singer exiled to Mali, a Syrian poet living in Stockholm, a Guatemalan journalist and a Burmese comedy troupe known as the Moustache Brothers. All that linked these various dissidents was the production team’s Guardianish world-view, which assumes that all artists stand for the same thing — a warm and softly focused global hug. And which also believes that poets will always trump generals, that cartoons are mightier than tanks. It is the Hans Christian Andersen school of political philosophy, which is always popular on Channel 4. And, while these stories ought to have been seasonally sentimental heart-tuggers, they came across as sanctimonious and patronising, a liberal waterboarding, like being beaten with rolled-up Amnesty ads.

Then there was the twist in the tail, the gotcha right at the end. The final gagged and abused freedom-of-speech martyr was David Irving, the right-wing historian imprisoned by the Austrians for his views on the holocaust. This was supposed to tweak our liberal noses. To make us think again about the true nature of freedom of speech. Oh my God, do you think it applies to conservatives as well? Do you think maybe we have to listen to military colonels as much as left-wing journalists? I never thought of that. Would you believe it? Whenever people quote Voltaire’s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, they never add the next sentence. It’s not actually what you say, it’s the smug, patronising and self-righteous tone you say it in that makes me want to send you to the guillotine. And I’m with the junta when it comes to comic Burmese buskers.

And so at last we must confront the Hairy Bikers, a toothsome twosome who strain the concept of freedom of speech to its outer limit. Who thought that this half-baked version of the Two Fat Ladies would be a good idea on telly? They encompass everything that is most cripplingly embarrassing about men. What women think about images of Jordan, I feel about the Hairy Bikers.

They have everything that is worst in us — mullets, facial hair, joshing banter, paunches, leather, regional accents — and they’re middle-aged fat gits on Easy Rider bikes. Pigs on Hogs. If Ant and Dec ever decide to stop taking the injections and grow up, this is what they’ll grow up to be.

In The Hairy Bakers, the two of them traverse the nation to construct a Christmas party that would have embarrassed a Travelodge welcome buffet. It was painfully awful. It’s not just their blokey, hopeless amateurism and gauche, chummy clumsiness that’s like having hot needles jabbed in your eyes. It’s that, on top of all that, they can’t cook. No, they can cook, but they just can’t make anything you’d want to put in your mouth. Even with all the fakery and wizardry, all the backstage home-economic help and editing available to them, the grub is atrocious. About as appetising as the thought of sucking their beards. With all the TV chefs, cooks and Nigella available to fill your Christmas colon, who would want to have these two anywhere near their kitchens? They remind me of regional television in the 1970s. It’s as if they’ve escaped from Nationwide. They are the best advertisement for converting to Greek Orthodoxy and postponing Christmas till they’ve bikered off.

In the week when there was nothing on television, Oliver Postgate upped and died. The man who invented Bagpuss and the Clangers, and had the most child-friendly, comforting and inviting voice in all broadcasting. You never know the real value and power of television until you taste the madeleine of the programmes of your childhood. The sound of Postgate reciting Ivor the Engine can reduce me to speechless tears. Noggin the Nog and Pingwings are a small, bright and hardy part of my cultural garden, as his programmes must be for thousands and thousands of children of the 1960s and 1970s.

I’ve just learnt that, privately, Postgate was a radical left-wing pacifist. His website is an engaging mixture of childlike nostalgia and curmudgeonly garden-shed polemic. To have left the world a peaceful Viking, a train with a helpful dragon and moon mice who live gentle lives under dustbin lids is a heroic legacy. What more could you ask than to have filled children’s heads with comforting dreams and visions of a kindly world? Postgate is an example that how you say it is as important as what you say.

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