Television - Andrew Billen feels a mild stirring of the spirit on watching Alpha

In 1963, David Frost was the hottest, wickedest thing on television, the Chris Morris of his day. Early that year, as the host of That Was The Week That Was, he presented a "Consumers' Guide to Religion" in which he road-tested the major faiths. The best aspect of the Church of England, he concluded, was that it "didn't interfere with essentials": "All in all, we think you get a jolly good little faith for a very modest outlay, and we have no hesitation in claiming it the Best Buy." The sketch caused the predictable press kerfuffle.

God, as it were, knows what the 23-year-old Frost would have made of his 62-year-old future self presenting Alpha: will it change their lives? (Sundays, midnight, ITV). In so many ways - from production values to structure to script - this is a contender for worst programme of the year, but its greatest sin is to sell its objectivity. In other hands, it could have been a fascinating examination of the genuine phenomenon of how a Pentecostal church in Knightsbridge has attracted a million Britons to an induction course into religious fundamentalism at a time when church attendances are continuing their historic progression towards too-small-to-measure. Instead, it is an advertorial for a wing of the C of E. It is almost impossible to differentiate the editorial position of Sir David, loitering in the aisle of Holy Trinity Brompton, and Reverend Nicky Gumbel, the cult's leader, preaching from the pulpit. "The Alpha story is an extraordinary one," said Frost, hyping it up. "It can change some people's lives."

Episode one bristled with testimonials from the converted. I have seen more rigorous interviewing in Daz commercials. A convert was filmed in dreamy soft focus in her Lincolnshire garden in high summer. She had been "greeted" by God in a sitting room where an Alpha women's group met. Being a Christian was very exciting, she said without any interruption from an interviewer, or a psychologist, who might have suggested that she was cruelly vulnerable to being greeted by spirits, after the death of an 11-week-old daughter.

"Alpha does work - but not, it must be said, for everyone," Frost admitted, and you hoped that at last you would hear from someone who had grown bored with the course, rejected it as well-meaning nonsense or, perhaps, been damaged by it. Maybe we would hear from those who objected to Alpha's strictures on sex before marriage, homosexuality, divorce and abortion. Perhaps someone would talk about the mass hysteria and the speaking in tongues it allegedly induces.

But no, Frosty was merely trying to lock in some tension about the ten young people who had agreed to be filmed as they went through the course: "After the break, we'll take a look at the Alpha Ten and their potential staying power." So Frosty had already made an implicit value judgement. Those who eventually signed up for Jesus would have proved their "staying power". And the rest? Quitters, presumably, rather than people who had concluded they had wasted ten Wednesdays of their lives hearing fairy stories about a first-century mystic. So the programme moved on to profiling its guinea pigs much in the way that The Heat Is On (Tuesdays, 8pm, BBC1), the new Castaway rip-off, introduced its survival course contestants. But less revealingly.

The second instalment interwove the initial reactions of the ten into a rambling sermon by Gumbel. Gumbel, who looks, as someone said, more like a ski-instructor than a clergyman, is slightly posh and effeminate, and does "humble" very well. He cribs his best lines from thinkers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson and Bernard Levin and, like all preachers, is better at stating the problem of living in a meaningless universe than solving it. The last few minutes was all God-is-Love assertion. One of the ten called him "the best salesman I've ever met", which was generous, I thought.

The programme is not without value. I may even go on watching it because the subject is so interesting. But it belongs on the God Channel on Sky, not on ITV, which operates under the ITC codes of impartiality when it comes to religion. The only criticism of Alpha expressed on the show was from within the C of E, and voiced by a minister from Sheffield who doubted that the Bible should be read as God's word rather than man's. The National Secular Society was quite right to complain.

What am I asking for here? It would be unreasonable for me, as an atheist, to ask for the kind of doomy hatchet job that Reputations (Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC2) pulled on Reverend Sun Myung Moon, "Emperor of the Universe", on 7 August.

But even The Heat Is On was more analytical about its contestants' motives than this show. What was needed was the methodology of BBC2's Clouds towards rehab: informed, sympathetic but objective, fly-on-the-wall reporting. "Spiritual" emptiness is, after all, as much a symptom of psychological malaise as is alcoholism. But, frankly, after this credulous and misjudged effort, I would have taken from the Methodist minister's son the Consumers' Guide to God approach. Whatever else you can say about Alpha's rebranding of the C of E, you can't pretend it doesn't interfere with essentials.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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