AT WHAT point does typecasting become archetypecasting? It seems to have happened to Warren Clarke, the automatic choice these days when the script calls for a certain sort of Englishman. He has cornered the market in loveable oafs: no great shakes in the brain department, but salt-of-the-earth, plain-dealing yeomen. All of which makes him one of the few actors capable of carrying off the role of Josiah Cole, a salt-of-the-earth slave trader who serves up African women for the post-prandial entertainment of his business contacts and yet retains a claim on our sympathy. Society is the villain here. Josiah, ham-fisted and tumshie-faced, is a man of ''average integrity''. His chief failing is lack of imagination. Not something Philippa Gregory, writer of A Respectable Trade (BBC1, Sunday), could be accused of.

This four-part series takes a look at England's tainted past from a most un-eighteenth century perspective. There were times in the first episode when the periwigs and picture hats barely camouflaged what was effectively a debate about late-twentieth century liberalism and the temptation to collude with oppression if - in the colluder's opinion - it gives the oppressed an easier ride.

The tender conscience in question belonged to Cole's new wife Frances (the perfectly cast Emma Fielding, all flaring nostrils and pale stalk of neck), a gentlewoman snatched from the brink of lifelong spinsterhood and all-too conscious of the compromises made to secure the respectability of marriage. She recognised the vileness of her husband's trade, and yet she was the one who coaxed the raped African into a scold's bridle to prevent her suicide: a scene fraught with an almost unbearable mix of gentleness, coercion, and betrayed trust. Coming next: the moral ambiguities of inter-racial passion.

Scottish journalism tries to take the temperature of England with depressing regularity and, invariably, there is more than a touch of tit-for-tat in the undertaking: after years of reducing us to banal and witless stereotypes, see how you like it! The drawback to this approach is that it does not do much to enlighten. George Rosie, presenter of Our Friends in the South (ITV, Thursday), is too acute a mind not to be aware of this but still, he wasn't going to pass up those neds singing anti-Scottish football chants, or that pack of middle-aged Morris dancers, or the half-baked old buffer who runs This England magazine (from an address in Imperial Way, natch). Rosie's interviewees included an impressive selection of wimps, blimps, and dinosaurs including not one but two Rees-Moggs, Teresa Gorman, and a man who ran a T-shirt company called Philosophy Football.

We met Geordie municipal barons convinced that the North of England needed its own parliament, a view shared by Hampstead's own Melvyn Bragg, though Ms Gorman thought it was nonsense and Trevor Phillips (blatantly campaigning for the mayoralty) was more interested in London as a city-state. Bragg detected an increasing sense of Englishness in the populace; Jeremy Paxman, on the other hand, diagnosed an identity crisis; and Tony Benn defined England as the last colony left in the British empire. The overall impression was of chaos: probably a fairly accurate representation of the current state of English nationalism. In so far as it exists.

As one of 15 people in the country not to have read Fever Pitch the book or been to see the movie, I turned to Omnibus: Man of the Match - Nick Hornby (BBC1, Tuesday) expecting to meet a wisecracking, label-literate, lager lout - more or less the sort of figure cut by Will Self as he savaged Hornby's fictional ''sub-genre'' with its ''wimpish nonentities whingeing about their neuroses''. Instead Hornby, reluctant founder of the cult of the New Lad, turned out to be a dweeb, a mild-mannered slaphead with jug ears who gained his inspiration for the book from therapy. A sweetie, but hardly the stuff role models are made of.

Roddy Doyle and Blake Morrison found much to admire in Hornby's best-selling confessions of a lifelong obsession with

Arsenal Football Club, though his next two books did not elicit quite the same ringing praise. You don't have to be a cynic to see in High Fidelity (a novel which trades on the narrator's extensive knowledge of music) and About a Boy (a ''satire'' on men's style magazines) calculated attempts to repeat what he did so effortlessly first time round: capture the voice of a generation. Except, of course, that everybody's at it now. Fever Pitch effected a small revolution in the publishing trade and suddenly tyro 20-something authors were being told to take their thinly-disguised autobiographical novels and turn them back into blatant memoir.

If you really want insight into the condition of England, Hornby and his imitators in the literary ranks of Cool Britannia are as revealing as anyone quizzed by Rosie. A nation of callow, cleverish young men who woke up to find the culture in their hands and are now busily ransacking their teenage hobbies for something to put on the page.

Stressed Eric (BBC2, Monday) is an ''adult animation'', executed by a team in Los Angeles but devised by British sitcom writer Carl Gorham. The joke is relentlessly one-dimensional: feeble single father with constantly throbbing temple battles against overwhelming odds and loses. His former spouse is finding herself with the help of a goatee-bearded Buddhist lover, leaving Eric to cope with the omnivorous son (toys, phones, the baby Jesus in the school nativity play) and the allergic daughter whose tongue swells up at the wrong sort of breakfast cereal. Then there's the feckless au pair, the office cleaner who regularly consigns Eric's vital paperwork to the bin, and the boss who is running out of patience with his stress-related illnesses. To complete his misery, the next-door neighbours are a Mr and Mrs Perfect.

Of course, it is possible that there are parents out there so traumatised by their responsibilities that Stressed Eric strikes them as funny, but it's difficult to believe. Maybe it's meant to be cathartic. Personally, I found it raised the blood pressure and numbed the brain in equal measure.