The Family (Channel 4)

Natural World (BBC Two)

Spooks (BBC One)

Minorities are used to crumbs from the TV table. One disabled character here, a gay there ... boxes ticked. When a crumb falls two things can happen: a raft of “political correctness gone mad” headlines; the second, and more profound, is the feeling that the crumb is precisely that, and what would be more welcome is a meal. Not just one gay/Asian/disabled character here and there, but a whole bunch. Everywhere. So many that the heads of all the “political correctness gone mad” headline-writers would blow, guts and nerve endings everywhere, sky high ... overwhelmed at the flood of non-white, non-heterosexual, differently abled faces on screen. We can but dream.

However, don’t rely on crumbs, because they don’t fill you up. The new series of The Family has already been hailed as historic because it focuses on an Asian family, a reality TV first. Channel 4 would like us to think that this is the respectable end of the genre: filmed in a real house the truth about family life is unpeeled.

The first series focusing on the squabbling Hughes family was tedious. This second series features the Grewals, a Sikh family living in the shadow of the Heathrow flight path. You may well have found it passingly funny that Arvinder the dad orders wife Sarbjit to make him paratha for breakfast, rings her to order her to get up, and criticises her for falling asleep on the couch, then prevents her from sleeping. Their spats are played out as comic interludes. They’ve been together 35 years.

You are not encouraged to think, as I did, that Arvinder seemed like a sexist layabout who should get up, make his own food, and look after some of the domestic affairs of the household himself. This cloying patriarchy is being seamlessly transmitted to the next generation. Tindy, the youngest son, seems to spend most of his time in bed. He knows how to put the washing in the machine, but not which buttons to press to make it work. He doesn’t cook. But this young man is an adult and we are supposed to laugh at his hopelessness: a virgin who’s never been kissed. Is this deliberate domestic ineptitude and naivety to be applauded? Tindy asks why should he learn how to do anything for himself; he’ll go from being mummy’s boy to married man. Lucky ladies, apply here.

The Grewals, though, are apparently “modern”. Arvinder says he would let his children choose their own partners rather than insisting on an arranged marriage as he had. One of the gnarlier, and better, stories focuses on Shay, the would-be wife of son Sunny. Shay has been rejected by her family for wanting to marry Sunny; her family think he is not good enough for her. We watched her come back from a meeting with her brother in which he told her he would come to the wedding but only reluctantly. Her mother refuses even to speak to her. It was moving to hear her relate how the Grewals had taken her in as a de facto daughter; Arvinder had told her she was his responsibility now, whatever happens with Sunny.

The Grewals are undeniably fun to watch. Shay had made an X Factor-style promotional film (even including O Fortuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana as the music) to send out as a computer invite for her wedding. Arvinder cycled on a living room bicycle and did press-ups to try to get rid of his belly. And boy did they eat: every scene saw them at the table or couch tucking in.

But forget that the family is Asian, and forget that this is a real family. Despite their boisterous warmth, what do the Grewals show us that merits an hour of primetime TV? There’s nothing revelatory here. Isn’t watching them as voyeuristic as watching Big Brother? Why should the veneer of their ordinary, rather than celebrity, status confer on them a greater authenticity? Watching The Family is as boring as all those Christmas round-robins about other people’s families, yet because it’s “real” and the activities (sitting on the couch, eating) are “real”, then this supposedly elevates it. It doesn’t. Nothing much happening is nothing much happening.

Given the judicious editing and selective storylining, the “reality” here is every bit as manipulated as a hundred Celebrity Wife Swaps and Big Brothers. Let’s be honest and call The Family entertainment, and pretty dreary entertainment at that, not a penetrating piece of social observation.

Louis Mahoney, a fisherman, narrated another compulsive Natural World, about the Victoria Falls and the Zambezi. Mahoney’s lilting voice related the stories of the animals who lived “on the edge of the world”, while Jamie McPherson and Charlie Hamilton James’s photography was wonderfully vivid.

Spooks has returned. The life of a spy’s child was at stake, but it worked out very cleanly without anyone getting dunked into a vat of bubbling, face-melting, boiling fat. How will they ever better that?

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