For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as class, contemporary masculinity and modern secular rituals. (All a lot more fun than they sound, I promise.) Equipped with an infectious Sid James laugh and an impressive commitment to affability, he’s demonstrated a willingness to listen to opposing views, even to the extent of allowing his mind to be changed. He’s then turned his findings into both a convincing thesis and an art exhibition of some kind.

So what’s gone wrong in Grayson Perry’s Full English? The main problem, I think, was inadvertently laid bare right at the start of Thursday’s opening episode. In a quest to discover ‘what Englishness means today’, Perry told us, he’d be meeting people all over the country ‘who have a distinct idea of what English identity is’ – which, at a stroke, rules out most of the population. After all, not having a distinct idea of what English identity – at least not consciously – is surely central to English identity.

Well, not for the folks Perry talked to here, who almost by definition tended to fall somewhere between the unrepresentative and the pretty much bonkers.

His first encounter, for example, saw him taking to the English Channel with a bloke called Jeremy. A wedding DJ by night, by day Jeremy sails the waters off Dover objecting to the arrival of immigrants. Not that his attitudes are entirely illiberal. ‘These are human beings,’ he acknowledged with the air of one making a generous concession. ‘We’re not there to sink them.’ He merely wants to make the rest of us aware of the boatloads of foreigners crossing the Channel: something we apparently wouldn’t notice otherwise.

So what did we learn from this about England, rather than just about Jeremy? The answer of course was a firm ‘nothing’.

The same applied when Perry set off to find out what ‘the ancient people could tell us about English culture’. To this end, he hung out with members of the British Druid Society (founded 1979), as led by Greywolf – aka Philip – who explained that he’d ‘been working with Wolf Spirit since 1994’. He then gathered his people for a ceremony where they dressed as their favourite animal or tree in order ‘to build a bridge to the spirit world’.

Perry’s own costume was a very approximate deer outfit. Once in it, he was required to declare on behalf of English deer everywhere that ‘We stay in the shadows, but we are noble on the high lands’ – before adding on a more practical note, ‘Beware of us in the night when you are driving.’

Amid the continuing procession of eccentrics, there was one mildly illuminating section featuring Jay, a black England football fan who showed Perry round multicultural Lambeth, but demurred at his suggestion that anybody who didn’t recognise it as the true picture of modern England was ‘clinging on to a country that doesn’t exist’. ‘Maybe it exists where they’re from,’ replied Jay gently – which in previous series might have given Perry pause for thought. Here he didn’t even appear to notice that he’d been contradicted.

From everybody he met, Perry collected items that represent their notion of Englishness, and will indeed turn them into art exhibition. Of a convincing thesis, however, there was no sign. Instead, this felt like just another ‘Look at these funny people’ documentary that could have been presented by any old TV hack.

Far more promising is Channel 4’s new comedy Everyone Else Burns, which on the face of it is quite a strange show. Simon Bird stars as David, a Christian extremist first seen leading his family in a rehearsal for the coming apocalypse. (‘No food yet – you can have biscuits when the moon turns to blood.’) And from there, his disturbing religious mania continued to be played for knockabout laughs.

At heart, though, this is a resolutely traditional sitcom, with David in the Hancock/Mainwaring/Fawlty role of the pompous middle-aged man convinced, despite all the evidence, of his own rightness about everything.

Meanwhile, the characters around him add a little more depth, even poignancy. Wife Fiona (Kate O’Flynn) is belatedly beginning to realise – or allow herself to admit – what a nightmare he is. Daughter Rachel (Amy James-Kelly) dreams of university, going so far as to do well in her exams. (‘How much preaching time did you waste revising?’ her dad asked her indignantly.)

So far, the only trouble is that, although David is given plenty of great lines, he’s so one-note as to risk becoming tiresome. Fortunately, at the end of Monday’s second episode of two, there were hints that he might be having some unwelcome glimmers of self-knowledge – which would be good news for the programme as well as for his poor family.