'Stand by for more freaky foreign stuff!" hollered the voice on my television set. It struck me as a strange sort of request, but I did the only thing one can do in such a circumstance - I stood by.

I was happy to stand by, actually. I am never averse to a little freaky foreign stuff, especially on a week night. I find it brightens what could so easily be a drab evening in.

But as I stood by, waiting for the freaky foreign stuff, I began to reflect. That is the problem with ad breaks nowadays - they are so long that they give the viewer enough time to reflect. The voice hollering on my TV had itself been foreign, I reflected, so for all I knew the freaky foreign stuff might not be foreign to me at all - it might just be freaky stuff from my neighbourhood.

And come to think of it, the voice was not just foreign, it was American. Now, I find many Americans more than a little peculiar, so who knows what an American criterion for freakiness might be? I didn't want to be standing by just to watch perfectly ordinary scenes from next door.

But fortunately all was well - much of the stuff was indeed freaky, and it was from exotic locations that I could comfortably call foreign.

Maximum Exposure (SABC3; Saturday; 9.30pm) is an American show consisting entirely of clips gathered from European and Asian television channels. As far as I can gather, its purpose is to enable Americans to laugh at other countries. How do I gather this? Because the voice-over said: "Other countries are weird. And funny!"

Frankly, I think this is a healthy development in the long, proud history of American insularity. Americans don't ordinarily laugh at other people. They may not understand other people or much like other people, but in public they seldom laugh at them. "Diversity" is their watchword. Laughing might cause offence, and Americans dislike giving offence in public. They may drop bombs on other people, but they hardly ever laugh at them.

In any case, I am a great fan of xenophobic humour. Some people think less of those who laugh at other cultures, but not me. Nothing makes me giggle more than a stereotype. Unwashed Frenchmen, English people with bad teeth, thieving gypsies, Turkish jailors, Greek men with towels round their waists and a twinkle in their eye E now that's comedy. If you can't laugh at foreigners, I always say, then who can you laugh at?

At any rate, Maximum Exposure took us through the panoply of peculiar foreigners. There are few foreigners more peculiar than English people at package-tour beach resorts, which was fortunate, as they featured heavily. I couldn't see their teeth, alas, but one glimpse of those knobbly knees and sticky-outy ears and cerise sun-tans and I was laughing like a drain that had been told a very funny joke.

The Americans wanted us to laugh at the peculiar party game the Brits were playing, which as far as I could work out involved musical chairs and grapes and people's buttocks, those staple ingredients of the English good time. As usual with the Brits, the Americans had missed the point. There were some half-hearted attempts to laugh at the Italians, involving footage of some or other festival at which Italians seem to find it relaxing to throw tomatoes around in the street, but Italians are only ever really funny when they are fighting a war, so the segment fell a little flat.

The show saved its biggest laughs for south-east Asia, which I suppose should suggest something about the hidden wellsprings of humour.

"You really, really don't want to go to Thailand! Terrible things happen in Thailand!" the American voice-over admonished us, although I suspect that at some profound psycho-cultural level, he wasn't actually thinking about Thailand at all, but another southeast Asian country further south and further east. Still, it can't be denied: strange things do indeed happen in Thailand.

Maximum Exposure could only really offer footage of tourist shows in which slim Thai girls wrestled crocodiles, or cultural displays in which local monks stood on their heads for three years, but it all brought back memories. Once, a long time ago, I too saw a Thai tourist show in Bangkok.

Much of the show was what you might describe as a demonstration of dexterity, in which a variety of young ladies demonstrated how they might go about their daily business - writing letters, smoking cigarettes, picking up coins from the floor, concealing deciduous fruit - if they were suddenly to be deprived of the use of their hands.

Two young lady athletes even demonstrated how to play ping-pong with no hands, although I have to say they were in frequent breach of the rules, and no one seemed to be keeping a very close eye on the score. It was all very educational, especially when a married couple appeared on stage to demonstrate what can most politely be described as Thai conjugal techniques, conclusively proving that regular heroin use need not stop you enjoying a nightly sex life.

My point is that you never know what might happen in Thailand, which is why I scrutinised the contestants carefully for any sign of ping-pong paddles or deciduous fruit in the first episode of Survivor: Thailand (SABC3; Thursdays; 7pm). No such luck.

One fellow did arrive on their island in the Andaman Sea bearing golf clubs, but I rather gather he hoped to use them as sporting equipment, rather than as saucy visual aids to brighten a slow evening in the orient. For the most part, the survivors seem to be the stock grab-bag of Yanks transplanted to attractive parts of the world to squabble among themselves and complain about the food. Americans - they're weird. And funny.