Are you smarter than a 10-year-old?

The country to the west of Sweden is: a) Russia, b) Norway, c) Finland?” We watched a man failing to commit to a guess on this question of gordian complexity. He failed to find an answer for possibly five minutes, possibly half an hour. He was a big, chubby, bladder-faced mouth-breather. “Ooh, I don’t know. I’m hearing Russia. I’m sure it’s Russia, but I think that’s wrong. Finland, it’s definitely not Finland, definitely, but then, with my luck, it is Finland. It’s almost certainly Finland. Okay, I’m going to go with Norway. No, hold on a minute.”

This was on Are You Smarter Than a 10-year-old? (Sunday, Sky One), a title that is itself a question a 10-year-old could answer says AA Gill in his latest column. No, of course we’re not as clever as 10-year-olds. Ten-year-olds can do long division and understand the rules of rugby, Oh Hell! and British bulldogs. Ten-year-olds can hold their breath till they faint, they can pee over their own head and repeat 70 comedy catch phrases, one after the other, in the voice of a Dalek. What 10-year-olds don’t know is how to reverse-park, how to offer a compliment when you don’t mean it, how to eat bitter things and how to find a clitoris in the dark. We’re not as clever as 10-year-olds because 10-year-olds are a different species, they have a whole other life plan and reason for existence. Not being as clever as a 10-year-old is like saying you’re not as clever as a zebra crossing or a right-angled triangle or Gary Lineker.

Anyway, this quiz isn’t really about whether any of us are as clever as 10-year-olds. It’s really about how many other stupid contestants we can put on daytime television. It’s a competition for talent agents who, I expect, have bets about which of them can find the dumbest adult in Britain. Unfortunately, the mouth-breather finally got the question right. It was a sad anticlimax. The pleasure is in seeing people lose notional wealth. If you’re already watching television in the middle of the afternoon and you’re not a 10-year-old, it’s fair to assume you’re already wallowing in the warm bath that is self-loathing and shame, and that the uplifting little parables of feckless optimists getting small unearned fortunes by chance is not what you need to see.

One of the many structural truisms of superheroes is that they will always be miserable. Why is that? You suddenly discover you can fly without a ticket. You can jump the space-time continuum, you can see through underwear or throw thunderbolts. Why do you instantly become a self-pitying victim? I’d have thought that being a good-looking teenager who could punch holes in breeze-block walls and read other people’s minds would be pretty cool. Apparently not. The kids in Heroes (Thursday, BBC2) are weighed down with their genetic good fortune. The first episode of this second series couldn’t have been more maudlinly depressing if it had Brenda Blethyn and Tim Spall as Catwoman and Penguin.

American producers are said to have apologised for the slow, dull longueurs of the first episode, but it had such a vast and committed teenage audience that they will probably see this crapness as being an added special feature. For blokes like me, however, who have forgotten how to be as smart as a 15-year-old, I’d really have liked them to have cut to the chase, broken out the superpowers and started settling scores, zapping the bad guys. Instead, they all constantly ran and hid.

When heroes are victims, what does that leave you with? I suspect it leaves you with teenagers. Perhaps the cleverness of this series is that it neatly replicates the otherworldly existential angst that is the brief maelstrom of teendom. Feeling special and different, with a vain belief in your spectacular talents, while being mortified and martyred by the gross injustice of life, is the definition of being a teenager. Frankly, I’m pleased I don’t have to identify any more, but what I do wonder is why they cast Hayden Panettiere as Claire the cheerleader. She is so short, she makes Avril Lavigne look like Claudia Schiffer. The only thing she could cheerlead would be Subbuteo football. I know a lot of stars are, in fact, short of stature, with unfeasibly big heads – Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman - but there should be some sort of height-restriction thing. Claire is just lost among the normal-sized folk. Why couldn’t they have given her special powers to stand on a box or grow a neck or something?

I was surprisingly gripped by the first double episode of Waking the Dead (Monday/Tuesday, BBC1). I say “surprisingly” because these procedural violent whodunnits with mephistophelians and psychopaths really aren’t my thing. Nobody ever seems to mind about the deaths: there is a brief moment when they go, “Ooh, nasty”, and then it’s on with the clues. There’s no room for grief in these shows. Nobody’s sad or bereaved, and death loses its sting. But Waking the Dead turns out to be very good. However, it suffers from the intrinsic fault of all detective stories - too much plot. As the audience gets smarter at solving murder mysteries, and as there are just more and more plots told, so the narratives have to become more convoluted, with greater numbers of crimson sardines, the explanations become lengthier and the convention of getting everyone in the library for a quick run-down and an unmasking has all but gone.

Waking the Dead comes in two episodes, the first with all the exciting stuff and the second like the index and footnotes, with all the explanations. Still, it’s much better than the CSI franchise, not least because it has Trevor Eve, who is arguably the most accomplished actor on television. He knows precisely how far and hard to project a performance on the small screen. He is constantly watchable, always believable and every word out of his mouth has been thought about. In fact, all the casting in Waking the Dead is pretty impeccable. The genre itself is a bit of a sadistic psychopath, but this is an exciting revitalisation of a mouldy old corpse. Perhaps next they could be sent off to investigate the serial killing of the cast and crew of Midsomer Murders.

The British Academy Television Awards (Sunday, BBC1) should be renamed: “Can you become as tongue-tied, vain, stupid and embarrassing as a 10-year-old?” This is possibly the worst night’s TV of the year. How is it possible for an entertainment industry to be this unentertaining? The lines of jogging, malcoordinated, misshapen Tristrams getting up on stage and failing to say anything of the remotest interest or amusement was relentless. There is nothing quite as chronic as a fat, balding middle-aged man dressed up in I-don’t-do-black-tie black tie trying to look gritty and cool while accepting an award.

As with daytime telly, the great pleasure is in seeing who doesn’t win. I was pleased none of the reality vaudeville shows made it to the lectern. I was disappointed that the pile of toe-curling, politically correct drivel Britz got best drama serial, but mostly I was pleased by the awards given to Eileen Atkins, mesmerising and brilliant in Cranford, and to Molly Dineen’s peerlessly made, elegiac The Lie of the Land, which won best single documentary. These two on their own were worth the licence fee and were as valuable as any piece of art produced in any medium all year.