You can imagine the creative meeting that took place for the BBC’s latest adventure in programming-using-other-people’s-money: To explain globalization, let’s send a shipping container around the world! It’ll be as compelling as stolen garden gnomes sending postcards home! Square object, round planet. The irony must have seemed delicious.

The result isn’t. Only a BBC executive in London could think that a topic as scintillating as shipping and receiving would be a recipe for good television.

The latest episode has as backdrops the Port of Los Angeles and, of course, the misery of the American economy. It features two of the biggest crates in the BBC inventory — a big, silent metal one and tendentious U.S. correspondent Matt Frei. (You can’t confuse them because, as Frei helpfully notes, the metal one “is bright red and emblazoned with the letters BBC.”) I defy any adult to watch all 1 minute, 54 seconds of this and locate even a small piece of information that you don’t already know.

The BBC would have done better to follow a thin envelope posted to anywhere from France. My friend, the composer/songwriter Georg Kajanus, recently sent a letter from Boulogne-sur-Mer to New York. It arrived several weeks late, having gone via Teheran. I sent a letter from my hangout in western France to London. It took a while since, to use Frei’s exciting phrase, it had to “brave pirates” and go to Indonesia first.

I’m not kidding, either. “While the neighbouring straits of Malacca are no longer the brigand-infested waters they once were,” explains a BBC shipping correspondent, “piracy is no joke” Unlike the BBC’s box.