Last Night's Television: Greatest Cities of the World With Griff Rhys Jones, ITV1Paul Merton in India, FIVE

Greatest Cities of the World with Griff Rhys Jones isn't going to win any prizes for wit and brevity in titling. It comes across more like a product relaunch than a television programme. You can imagine the advertising campaign: "Now, the great New York flavours you've always loved – but with added Griff Rhys Jones". And how familiar some of those flavours were. It takes a rare dedication to the obvious to open your New York travelogue with a cityscape and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, as Woody Allen famously did in Manhattan, and then simply not bother to undercut the second-hand romanticism with any kind of self-deprecating joke. Then again, people will go a long way for a cliché, as virtually every first-time visitor to New York demonstrates, ticking off the must-see boxes one by one. So perhaps a successful TV travelogue has to pay its dues to skyscrapers and Grand Central station and hot-dog stands before branching out a little. Even so, his early promise was worrying. "Over the next 24 hours, I intend to explore this town and try to understand what really makes New York New York." "Twenty-four hours?" you thought. There are people who've lived there all their lives who wouldn't pretend to know.

The 24-hour thing turned out not to be a measure of the shooting schedule, but the diurnal roll around that Griff's findings had been structured, starting with an early-morning flag- raising in Battery Park and concluding with the dawn delivery of one of New York's newest citizens 24 hours later. But that still left one big question for loyal consumers of New York: what kind of additive was Griff Rhys Jones going to be? The answer, as it often is in these celebrity-tourist deals, involved VIP access. Most of us would be able to take the Staten Island ferry, stare back at Manhattan and muse about America's immigrant beginnings, as Griff did here. But we probably wouldn't be allowed to do a turn as a busboy in a busy diner or a stint on the Upper East Side with the guys from the New York Department of Sanitation. And we certainly wouldn't get to harness ourselves up to an abseiling rig and clean the uppermost windows on a 30-storey skyscraper.

Some of this access just gets you rubbernecking privileges, as when we visited the $7,000-a-night Carlyle Hotel suite that George Clooney had just checked out of. Some of it gets you a little further in grasping the nature of the city. The sequence in Grand Central station, looking down on a concourse through which 700,000 people pass every day without ever bumping into one another, was neatly enlisted as an emblem of the crowded solitariness of city life, and there was a touching moment when Griff sat in on the rehearsal of a Harlem gospel choir. But you still ended with a curiously grit-free sense of New York as a collage of novelties, local colour and wow-statistics, and with most of your received opinions still intact.

Paul Merton in India also began with travelogue cliché, talking about a "landscape of stunning vistas, etched from its rivers, sunsets and religious icons". Then there was one of those needle-skids that television producers use to mark abrupt disjunction and Merton announced that we weren't going to see any of that. What we could get instead, he said, would be "his India", a picaresque collection of oddities and eccentricities, which would give a bit of scope for his own dry comedy. There were tourist attractions here, but they were the kind of things that only Indian tourists would know about, such as the decommissioned airliner that had been set up in a former flight engineer's back garden somewhere in the suburbs of Delhi and offered virtual flights to those who couldn't afford the real thing. As Mr Gupta sat on the flight deck in front of a set of printed flight instruments, his customers back in the cabin happily followed the pre-flight announcements, tucked into a dodgy-looking airline meal, and then laughed uproariously as the public- address system told them to brace for an imminent ditching. The experience was rounded off with a mass stampede to the emergency exit and a dive down the inflatable slide. And curiously this decidedly unrepresentative and untypical spectacle did tell you something about modern India, and the gap between the aspiring poor and those who can afford to treat air travel as a necessary nuisance.

Merton concluded by visiting a Hindu festival in Junagadh where he discovered, to his consternation, that devotional practice in India is a many-faceted thing, and can include rolling your penis round a stout stick, tucking the whole assembly behind your legs and inviting a colleague to take a ride on the resulting footstand. "This doesn't happen often, but I am completely and utterly lost for words," said Merton after watching a saddhu carry out this operation. Evensong, it isn't.