When Mark Beaumont, a 25-year-old Scottish adventurer, announced to TV execs that he was going to circumscribe the world on a bicycle in less than 200 days it must have been a no-brainer commission. Beaumont, an affable politics graduate, could do much of the shooting, the local stalwart Peter Capaldi would provide the quietly urgent voiceover, while the thrilling journey itself - part Michael Palin, part Ewan and Charley - would provide oodles of breathtaking top telly moments: Beaumont beating an alpine avalanche; Beaumont dodging Taleban bullets; Beaumont leaping the Ngorongoro crater, etc.

The resulting show, however, though it did retain the dulcet Capaldi voiceover, was something of a disappointment. The Man Who Cycled the World featured lots of footage of Beaumont cycling and Beaumont moaning. And not much else. For it became immediately apparent that this journey eastwards, via Paris, India, Australia and America, would have few external obstacles other than the odd broken spoke or gruff border guard (and though the remaining three episodes gleefully promise a violent crash and a terrifying mugging, what they actually give us is Beaumont whimpering to camera and relating said incidents even more glumly than before).

The moaning, of course, wasn't Beaumont's fault. The programme-makers, faced with a complete absence of worldly drama, have fallen into the Ellen MacArthur trap, and seized upon Beaumont's regular video diary entries as a way of transforming his outward journey into a mythic internal struggle. This experience will “push his soul to the limit,” Capaldi cautioned at the outset, before adding, “It's the ultimate test!” Yet the video diary, as MacArthur famously proved, is a treacherous format that can cruelly expose your inner whinger. And Beaumont, sadly, wasted no time in exposing his. “I woke up and I felt terrible!” he said, cringing, drama queen-style, after eating a bad fish in the Ukraine. “For the second night in a row I was really sick!” he continued, next day, bottom lip shot forward. This creeping sense that Beaumont might just be a closet primadonna was compounded when his support team sent out a masseuse to meet him on the road. Not because he was ailing, but because, like, hey, he needed a massage!

Worse still, we never got a sense of who he was, or why he did this other than to snag a place in the Guinness Book of Records. In the end, Beaumont never screamed, shouted or cried with joy, fear or relief. He never gave any indication of what exactly his soul was made of, or if he had one at all. He just cycled.

Superhuman: Genius posed the most profoundly philosophical question of the night, through one of its subjects, the 13-year-old art prodigy Akiane Kramarik. The programme, a woeful piece of slipshod reportage about what makes a so-called genius, focused heavily on the Idaho-based Akiane, who had been receiving messages from God since early childhood. The Lord, it seemed, had been telling Akiane to paint, and guiding her through her multicoloured canvases of Day-Glo cloud scenes, cherubic children and a portrait of Christ with a Farah-flick hair-do and cool beard. Which, ultimately, raised the troubling question, in my mind at least: “Is God tacky?”

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