The BBC fulfils its public service remit with some truly awful programmes This Week, Florence Nightingale BBC1 The Culture Show, Women in BlackBBC2

Sometimes I find television completely baffling. Who comes up with this stuff? The BBC, as a public service broadcaster, has a commitment not only to drama, but to politics, the arts and religious programming. But how to deal with these things in a modern, exciting way so that (this, at least, is what I'm guessing the sweet little moppets who pass for commissioning editors think as they scratch their heads in top-level meetings) people actually watch them?

Thus, the strands dealing with these subjects grow ever odder. Take politics. Is This Week, the Thursday-night programme (11.35pm) presented by Andrew Neil, supposed to be satirical? Neil's peculiar delivery - he sounds like a tipsy sixth-former performing in an end-of-term review - suggests that this might be so. Except that it isn't funny, ironic or remotely up to exposing the vices of our politicians (truly amazing, given the extent of their vices). A recent guest was . . . Les Dennis. And why do Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo, who appear every week, sit so close together? Their thigh-rubbing is creepy.

Then, the arts. On Tuesday at 10pm, The Culture Show moved to a new slot (it used to be on Saturday nights, when anyone who might reasonably be expected to watch a programme about "culture" was in fact likely to be out consuming it). This has been hailed as a great step forward. Lots of journalists, including me, were invited to a party to celebrate it - I didn't go; my VAT returns looked especially alluring that night - and an awful trailer plugging it appeared, featuring well-known culture vultures such as Piers Morgan and Adrian Chiles. I love Chiles. He's a broadcasting genius. But he's not exactly the guy who leaps to mind when you need someone to tell you the plot of Lucia di Lammermoor and, sure enough, in the trailer, he duly informed us that culture is "boring" and not as good "as beer".

My God, I am glad the BBC spent our money on paying an ad agency (Fallon) to come up with this drivel, aren't you? Not that all this hullabaloo is fooling anyone. The Culture Show is now just half an hour long. And it's still presented by Lauren Laverne, late of the punk band Kenickie, and who, I learn from the Radio Times, is mostly watching Peppa Pig on TV now. I wonder what she and her colleague Andrew Graham-Dixon chatted about at the party. The sad passing of Robert Rauschenberg, probably.

Which brings me to religious programming. It's not all Songs of Praise these days, you know. On BBC2, we've just finished enjoying the disgrace that is Women in Black (Thursdays, 7.30pm), a series about the lives of "real" Muslim women around the world, which resolutely refused to look at the issue of faith and human rights, preferring instead to focus on parties, make-up and just how glam a shalwar kameez can be.

Then, last Sunday, we were treated to an hour-long drama, Florence Nightingale (7pm). I wasn't expecting this to be religious programming; I settled down in front of it thinking it would be an expensive version of the stories of corsets and derring-do that they used to tell on Blue Peter (Grace Darling, Florence Nightingale; these women, plus Lesley Judd, were my role models). But I started to smell a rat early on, when Florence's suitor reminded her of the night she "played the piano . . . something new by Mr Chopin". This wasn't dialogue; it was a line lifted straight out of a Bunty annual, circa 1976. Then Florence (Laura Fraser) began talking to camera. Or, to be accurate, explaining. The film was mostly given over not to maggot-infested leg wounds, but to Florence's relationship with God, and to her realisation that in the great hospital that is the world, He is Matron.

From Lytton Strachey on, people have tried to dent the Nightingale myth. This just plumped it, as she would have done a particularly wretched patient's pillows. I can only assume that, dreary and deeply weird, it will be enlisted one day soon to keep Ofcom happy: it comprised, by my calculation, almost 1 per cent of the religious programming that the BBC must deliver every year. I simply can't think of any other way to explain its awfulness.

Pick of the week

Mary, Queen of Shops
Starts 9 June, 9pm, BBC2
Mary Portas is back, jangling her jewellery and beefing up boutiques.

The Victorian Sex Explorer
9 June, 9pm, Channel 4
Rupert Everett on Richard Burton.

Margaret Thatcher: the Long Walk to Finchley
12 June, 9pm, BBC4
The young Maggie. Did she really have the hots for Ted Heath?

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