Forget the cars, ignore the garage banter, put aside the high-octane leaded geek oil. In fact, pretend the content never happened. Just look at Top Gear (Sunday, BBC2) as art. As light and movement and sound. Watch it as pure TV, as brilliance. It is a triumph of the craft of programme-making, of the minute, obsessive, musical masonry of editing, the french polishing of colourwashing and grading. Top Gear’s brilliance is that it’s the most radical makeover show on the box. It’s taken a smelly garden-shed, minority-interest, unsexy, unchic subject such as driving and titivated it like Baz Luhrmann doing On the Buses. Top Gear is now responsible for a hefty slice of the BBC’s income. It is an immensely lucrative format. But every show that has tried to imitate it (and they have been legion) has collapsed into a heap of hyperventilating mediocrity because they think the trick is in the personalities, the chemistry and the jolly tabloid set. It isn’t. It’s in spending a great deal of money, time and tinkering skill on all the behind-the-scenes stuff.

On last Sunday’s show, Jeremy did driving and talking in much the same way he’s driven and talked for years. But it was still immaculately watchable, beautifully shot, edited and offered to the screen. I didn’t care what the car was or how chuffed its ormskirk and tiddlystrobes were, or what Jeremy wanted to do with it from behind. I just wanted to look at it. It was the same with a race that the Three Stooges had across Japan. Do you ever care who wins? Of course not.

But it was simply and heroically shot, cut and paced. It was poetry and petrol. The real lesson for Tristrams to be gleaned from Top Gear is that every pound spent behind the lens is worth two up front. It’s worth mentioning again that Top Gear’s éminence grise is its executive producer, Andy Wilman.

The Qur’an (Monday, Channel 4) could have done with a lightness of touch, a few telling details and a natural storyteller. What we were offered was a solid ecumenical and wishfully hand-wringing documentary that had much the same tone as every other hand-wringing documentary about Muslims for the past five years. Despite its title, this one was only about the book itself in passing. Really, it was a liberal atheistic encomium on behalf of Islam. As always, the mullahs and the academics who explained that we got it all wrong and that it was really all peace and love and understanding were from western universities and cities, and everyone who wanted to cut the labias out of women, extinguish Jews and burn gays and Americans came from places that were poor, totalitarian police states full of injustice, corruption and unemployment. The one thing that religious fundamentalists and religiously apologetic liberals have in common is that they both think that it’s all about God, when, in fact, it’s prosaically about food, work, education and an incorrupt judiciary. But that isn’t such a polarising story. And how annoying to apply the politically correct spelling of Qur’an to show you’re right-on, but still pronounce it Koran because you’re frightened of sounding like a prat.

What television really, really needs, what it really, really wants, is another medical drama. There simply aren’t enough doctors on TV, are there? You’re always saying, “Ooh, what I want after dinner is something really gory and contagious.” Harley Street (Thursday, ITV1) is the new drama that shows you can never lose money by underestimating a commissioning editor’s imagination. The first episode began with a long tracking shot of a doctor walking down a corridor, asking questions, taking test results, being jolly and flirty. It was a direct plagiarism from the opening credits of every episode of ER, but done cheaper. And it was like watching La bohème performed by finger puppets. Right from the first line, we knew with absolute certainty that this was stillborn. It was going to be simply ghastly, a cross between the chronic Hotel Babylon and Doctor in the House. This is what all those larky, frustrated, medical-bloke sitcoms of the 1970s grew up to be. How clinically depressing is that? The crippling disability of this series is its writing. Appalling, turgid plot, plodding, explanatory bollocks without an emotionally honest muscle or believable bone. Every week, I have to make the same diagnosis. Your complaint is the writing. Television is using a diminishing bag of cliché and truism, phoney exclamations and untrue declarations made by uncoupled characters with disengaged, off-the-peg personalities. How often do you watch a scene of British drama and think: “The only thing connecting any of these people is that their names follow one another on a script. They could all swap dialogue and we would never notice”? Well, I shan’t get bored pointing out the semiliterate tedium of small-box writing as long as they continue broadcasting it. I can go on repeating myself as long as they can go on repeating themselves.

I was going to compare Harley Street with Grey’s Anatomy (Thursday, Five), the Mills & Boon hospital drama that is constructed with such glib and witty confidence, mixing breast-heaving flirtation with high-sentiment medical tear-jerking. But the new season has “jumped the shark”. This is an expression that comes from a memorable episode of Happy Days, when the Fonz leapt over a big fish on water-skis and everyone realised that the venerable series had finally, irretrievably lost the plot. This happens to all programmes if they hang around long enough. They jump the shark at that moment when they become so self-referential that they become parodies of themselves. The plot lines lose contact with earth to stave off the boredom and cover up the truth that the imagination has all gone. Grey’s Anatomy’s shark was letting Meredith die, talk to dead people in some purgatory, and then come back to life. Weird, pointless and embarrassing. Time to pull the tubes, put away the paddles and push the pillow over Grey’s face. As they inevitably say in doc-coms, “We have closure. It’s time to move on.”

Tabloid television critics tend to be rather more exciting than this column. They are full of little features that make you laugh, and often have sections of amusing double entendres taken from last week’s TV. I’m always in awe of these, because I can watch for weeks and never hear a racy sentence with a single amusing meaning, let alone two. But, just by chance this week, I caught one of these wriggling push-me-pull-yous and I was going to pass it on to my esteemed peer Ally Ross on The Sun, but he’s on holiday, so I thought: Well, why not use it myself? We’re not too fuddy-duddy to run a little below-the-gusset innuendo. So here goes. This is from the golf commentary by that old geezer who’s been doing it since gutta-percha balls (that’s not the entendre), Peter Alliss. This chap was finishing potting or putting or whatever and Alliss said in that voice: “Westwood has left himself a little tickler for a 69.” Blimey, I thought. That’s one of those double entendre things, and while I was basking in the glory of nabbing it, I realised that 69 is quite a common golf score and that the 18th hole was a smutty litany of mutual happy endings. Mr Alliss, being an old hand at this sort of thing, sucks up the innuendo and takes them as they come.

Editor's choice

• Exclusive: Listen to AC/DC's Black Ice
• Burning Bush with W
• Boy George on sex, drugs and Amy Winehouse