I know it's called the British Broadcasting Corporation, but the BBC seems to have a fixation with making programmes about Britain. We've already had guided tours by Alan Titchmarsh (The Nature of Britain), David Dimbleby (A Picture of Britain and How We Built Britain) and Lenny Henry (Lenny's Britain). So how could the BBC further exploit our country? You can imagine a meeting of TV executives, desperate for ideas until some bright spark came up with the notion of Britain From Above (BBC1).

Of course, the idea isn't new. The series Coast included many aerial shots of Britain, and I can remember a series called Flight Over Spain which was exactly that: film taken by a helicopter flying over different regions of Spain. One problem with the BBC's new series is that it's not all filmed from the air. It keeps coming down to the ground to interview people about different aspects of the country. Last week's first episode used computer-generated images masquerading as aerial shots, as well as bombarding us with impenetrable statistics.

This week's episode was better, although it started with presenter Andrew Marr unnecessarily jumping out of an aircraft strapped to a skydiver. The programme was educative but impaired by lazy generalisations. Andrew started in East Anglia, where he lied that "everything here is manmade", over-emphasising the point that humans have moulded the countryside which people think is entirely natural. Yet there were some attractive shots of the Folly at Faringdon and the White Horse of Uffington. He even showed Oxford as an example of how cities develop: "Oxford's a really wet place. The city has to fit the buildings around the water in areas that won't get flooded." That may have been true once but not nowadays!

The follow-up programme on BBC2, Britain from Above - The Land, was even more earthbound but it interestingly traced how East Anglia developed from a predominantly rural area. After the Second World War, mechanisation meant that "thousands of farming jobs disappeared". Some people shed no tears over the change. One farmer said: "We used to employ 80 farmworkers . . . the conditions they worked in were vile" and their main aim was "to get the hell out of agriculture". The empty farm cottages became homes for commuters.

Pop Britannia (BBC2) was also interesting: looking at the 1950s and noting that, at the start of the decade, popular music was dominated by big bands and their singers - and few artists wrote their own songs. Tin Pan Alley wasn't interested in teenagers until it realised there was money to be made from the new crazes for rock 'n' roll and trad jazz. Skiffle made youngsters realise that they could form their own bands, and guitars became the instruments of choice. Even John Lennon started in a skiffle group. Ironically, stars like Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, who started as rock 'n' roll singers, were soon sucked into light entertainment.

The Real Monarch of the Glen (BBC2) focused on Scotland, a large chunk of which (Alladale) has been bought by multi-millionaire Paul Lister, whose father made his millions by founding MFI. Paul wants to turn the area (currently full of 'stalkers' shooting the deer) into a huge game reserve for 'Highland safaris'. His plans may fall apart (like a cupboard I bought from MFI years ago), as he wants to introduce predators like wolves, wild boars and brown bears. He visits Sweden to purchase some elks, even though he is warned that brown bears bite elks' legs.

Back to England for The Cup (BBC2), a one-joke sitcom set in Bolton - about a kids' football team. The one joke is that the children's parents are more competitive than their offspring. It is filmed in the style of a documentary: something which worked well for The Office but which is already a tired format for comedy. The vainglorious, punchy parents are painfully unfunny, especially as Northerners are supposed to be sociable and friendly, not continually at one another's throats.