THE romantic side of my nature – it does exist – still believes in the communal telly experience. But for the times when I can't sit down with you, dear viewer, the TV companies supply "screeners" of the programmes and usually these come in little blank envelopes with the titles hastily scrawled in felt pen. Every now and then, however, a plastic box arrives and right away I'm suspicious.

The box, like the shiny-covered kind used for DVDs of your favourite movies, tells me this is a programme which fancies itself. Pacific Abyss was delivered in such a box and seems to think it is a movie. In fact, it really, truly believes it is The Abyss.

The Abyss, you may remember, was a movie about divers searching for a lost nuclear submarine. In the movie manqué that is Pacific Abyss, divers encounter sunken warships and tank-carriers. Diving expeditions can be very male and therefore very smelly so in The Abyss Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio provided fragrance. Here, the part of the game girl with the corkscrew curls is taken by Kate Humble.

Pacific Abyss, according to the accompanying information booklet, is "one of the most ambitious projects undertaken by the BBC Natural History Unit". The 30-strong dive team have not come to Micronesia to plouter about in Japanese wrecks; rather, they're searching for new species. And before we go any further, let's be clear: these are not mere divers but "extreme underwater adventurers".

The team seems to comprise Kate, a couple more Brits and 27 Americans. I'm sure the Yanks are brilliant at extreme underwater adventuring but they aren't half enthusiastic. That's not a controversial statement, although somehow, out on the ocean, their customary excitability ("David Attenborough has never been in this situation!") seems like a dire threat to the as-yet-unrecorded new life forms.

This may not entirely be their fault. They will have been encouraged to act up, develop their roles, establish their "characters" – if not by the programme's producers, then the prevailing trend for documentaries with drama pretensions. In The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau, characterisation went no further than Cousteau sporting a beret. But the angle of the beret was decidedly un-jaunty. Everyone aboard Cousteau's 'Calypso' was there to dive and they just got on with it. On the 'Big Blue Explorer' (even this boat's name is a boast) every single fart is dramatised. And every single technical snag becomes life-or-death.

There was a lot of techno-bilge in the opener, all of it relayed by a sonorous voiceover doubtless causing even more havoc along the seabed. This only increased my suspicions about Pacific Abyss. What if no new fish were to turn up? Then one did, discovered by the diver with the keenest sense of his own mythology: while everyone else gets fully rubbered up, he stays in his shorts. The fishie didn't look especially new; in fact it bore a strong resemblance to the goldfish I won at the Burntisland Shows in 1969. But the oceans are vast and it has its place in them. As do extreme underwater adventurers, I guess.

We left this lot in extremis. Or so the voiceover had us believe, to say nothing of the thumping soundtrack. A storm had whipped up as – minus Kate – they dived down the side of an atoll twice as big as Ben Nevis. Radio contact has been lost. What are their chances of not becoming shark-food? With two instalments left, the programme is in danger of crying wolf, or wolf fish. Is there such a creature? I'm sure these guys could find it, if they can just hold on. My advice is: save oxygen – stop whooping. Even if it is the American way.

In my memory now, Jacques Cousteau only ever caught existentialist fish on bicycles. Or was that an Absolutely sketch? I miss those Scottish absurdists so it's good to see two of them back in action – well, one, anyway. Jack Docherty, a man of impeccable taste, supports Hibs. Moray Hunter, on the other hand, is a Hearts fan.

Football is the theme of The Cup, a (for them as writers) straight comedy of some charm about a Bolton boys' team. Ashburn United's manager is of the old-school disciplinarian variety and therefore Scottish: his team-talks involve hurling teacups at the dressing-room wall. And to the best of my knowledge, the gag about meddling chairmen at the expense of Hearts' Vladimir Romanov was a prime-time first for the Jambos, and seemed to confirm them as a national joke.

But the best laughs come at the expense of the competitive dads, played by Steve Edge (as ever, brilliantly gormless) and Pal Aron. The latter is a gynaecologist who's recently relocated from a small village because "there are more vaginas in Bolton".

Moving breathlessly on, The Perfect Vagina was an investigation into the biggest growth area in cosmetic surgery, with clinics reporting a 300% increase in demand. Presenter Lisa Rogers assumed the most painful of nips and tucks was for the benefit of men and set about trying to persuade women to love themselves.

Apparently it all began with Sex And The City. A notorious episode about bikini-waxing opened up a whole new area of female self-doubt. Rogers visited an artist making moulds of 400 vaginas and took along a woman who believed her life would only improve if she had the surgery. Suddenly she realised everyone was different, and she was no more different than anyone else.

A pretty 21-year-old tired of the taunts of her sister still went under the knife (and after visiting the new vagina shop, I hope she went next door to the new sister shop). The operation was unwatchable, but women will still submit to it if the attitudes of Rogers' decorators are typical. Rogers wondered what they had to boast about, in the genital department, but stopped short of asking for a look. "That seemed to be stepping over the boundary," she said, "when they'd only come to paint my beams."