Johnny Vegas's Guide to Evangelical Christianity Channel 4, 11.05pm 9/11: Ground Zero Underworld Channel 4, 9pm Comedy devotees expecting the usual loud dollop of Johnny Vegas's sure brand of stand-up iconoclasm could have felt cheated by his Guide to Evangelical Christianity.

They shouldn't necessarily have done so, mind. Strangely, you see, their stout-swilling, larger-than-life anti-hero soon receded from view, allowing Johnny's thoughtful everyday alter ego, the only slightly-less-than-life-sized Michael Pennington, to step up and air some quiet, saddened doubts about the strength of his own religious faith.

In terms of delivering simple knockabout laughs, JV's Guide had actually begun promisingly enough. First, he returned to the scene of what he'd evidently long viewed as a lucky childhood escape from the painful clutches of the Roman Catholic priesthood. Standing in the dust of the abandoned old seminary in which he'd spent a fraught 18 months as a boy, Johnny overcame his lingering fear of the place by defiantly sparking up a ciggie and waxing caustic. In particular, he recalled with a sneer how his ET doll had been confiscated for being mildly sacrilegious.

Then it was off to the good ol' United States to shoot fish in a barrel. Hey, how can you go wrong mocking the many squillions of Christian fundamentalist wackoids currently littering the place?

Initially, Johnny's voiceover evoked his stage act (think Bernard Manning's grandson with a Middlesex University degree in ceramic design). Summarising the arguments put forward by an eager Creationist encountered in Nevada, Johnny observed in his trademark northern clubland rasp: "'Is literal readin' o' Genesis seems fairly 'armless to me. At worst, it leads to some confused schoolchildren in a biology class in Kansas 'oo probably 'aven't bin payin' attention anyway as they're so busy not 'avin' sex."

Then Johnny faltered all too humanly, falling speechless before smiling bands of muscular all-American born-agains. Politeness it must have been that stopped him quizzing the Denver apocalyptist who trusted in Sunday-school coffee and doughnuts - but not homosexuals - and who reckoned all the Middle East's deadly complexities could be solved merely by packing every Jew off to Israel (like the preacher man said: such a fuss over a piece of property the size of New Jersey).

At a blissed-out church service in Colorado Springs, Johnny's conscience kicked in big-time and he confessed that it was too easy for him to make fun of those evangelical folk who were getting more answers about life's meaning than he was. Here, it struck me that Johnny should have asked such folk more questions about some of those answers - especially the more illiberal ones they espoused. But I digress. He also apologised for having labelled them all wackos in advance. "I felt envious of the people in there they have something I haven't got," he went on, looking shell-shocked and shame-faced, before concluding: "It's left me at the start of a long journey into personal discovery. I'm looking for someone more charismatic than myself to lead me spiritually."

And here it was that Johnny Vegas offered valuable confirmation as to who he truly is. Much more than a fine comic creation, he's also a decent, humble soul with pain in his giant heart. A lot of folk - some more wisely religious than others - will be praying for you, lad.

Bidding to score melodramatic points from tragedy, 9/11: Ground Zero Underworld succeeded only in being a cheap holiday in a large number of other people's misery. With portentous self-regard, the programme claimed to hymn the selfless dedication of those who laboured for months amid the World Trade Centre's ruins to identify its victims. In fact, it was an unforgivable intrusion into private grief.