The new buzz word in television is jeopardy.

Everything has to appear dangerous and high-risk even if it isn't really. It's why the presenters of MasterChef say things such as "the mashed potato is a dangerous move!" and Gok Wan says things like "I'm going to risk it all on the culottes!". There is no perspective. There is a kind of collective hysteria. If I was able to, I would give television a slap across the cheek and tell it to calm down.

Sadly, Ewan McGregor: Cold Chain Mission (BBC Two, Sunday, 9pm) is not immune from this trend. McGregor's mission was to take polio vaccines to remote parts of India and Nepal. It's something that involves a fair amount of risk – landing on the world's most dangerous air strip in the Himalayas for example – but the producers still couldn't resist the temptation to make even the less risky parts of the journey look like jeopardy too.

At one point, for example, high up in the cold Himalayas, Ewan decided he needed a pair of long johns and dramatic, movie-trailer music played over shots of him searching for a pair in a market. Would he find the long johns? Would they be the right size? What colour would he choose? The questions hovered in the high-altitude atmosphere of carefully faked tension.

There was no need for all the hysteria, the faux crisis, because the subject at the heart of the documentary was interesting in its own right: how do health workers get vaccines out to the remote parts of the world?

The only problem was that the people who could tell us – the health workers – were reduced to non-speaking roles in a Ewan McGregor action movie called The Immuniser. Or The Vaccinator.

None of this was McGregor's fault. In fact, despite all the nonsense around him, he emerged as self-deprecating, amusing and willing to undermine some of the silliness that surrounds his day job. But even he couldn't deflect attention from the queasy formula Cold Chain Mission was working to: polio is not interesting, but polio plus celebrity is. And if you add jeopardy, you have a show.

You might think all of this is OK, that a celebrity like McGregor can and should get involved and make important issues more watchable, but in the case of Cold Chain Mission it was at the expense of any political, social or financial context. Here we were watching a programme about polio and learning nothing of any depth about it. We learned that Ewan McGregor wears long johns and has a tattoo in an interesting place, but it was at the expense of any understanding of what the documentary purported to be about. There was a time when reporters went around the world and told us the story. Now the TV screen is filled with the faces of celebrities with the story only glimpsed over their shoulders.

The Apprentice (BBC One, Wednesday, 9pm) was in Scotland this week, which gave us a good chance to laugh at the English. The challenge was to provide street food and, demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of almost every nuance of Scottish sport and culture, one of the teams tried to charge Rangers fans £7.99 for pasta. As Lord Sugar said, that's more than they pay for a striker.