AM I a crude and heartless person? If you’d seen me watching Employable Me (BBC2, Wednesday) you might think so because I saw Paul enduring the humiliation and horror of Tourette’s Syndrome. And, yes, I almost died laughing.

Employable Me is a new three-part documentary series about how people with neurological conditions like autism and Tourette’s find it hugely difficult to find work. Paul, for example, hasn’t had a job for six years because every door closed to him when he suddenly developed Tourette’s following the drastic emotional upheaval of a close friend’s funeral.

No job for six years? On your bike! Privileged fools like Iain Duncan Smith and his ilk would say that these people don’t want to work and need to be prodded and bullied into getting a job, but if they’d only have the patience and humility to sit down and watch this series I would hope a tiny sliver of decency might enter their heads and hearts. They’d appreciate that some people desperately want a job and, naturally, the pride, confidence and independence as well as the friendships and the simple money in the bank that a good job brings.

Paul, who has extreme Tourette’s, and Brett, who also features and who has a severe form of autism which inhibits his speech and wrecks his confidence, would dearly love a job but no one will give them one. It’s as simple as that. They try, and tell us in painful detail how they get repeatedly rejected or ignored.

This programme made a brilliant case for people with disabilities, showing that in examples such as Brett and Paul, they simply need a bit of understanding and a more enlightened attitude from employers. See past Brett’s stumbling speech, or Paul’s ludicrous shouts and tics, and you’ll find two men who have incredible strengths. Both are of above average intelligence and both have awesome courage and determination. Why else would they keep on trying even though society keeps pushing them away?

But before I start crusading and praising, let’s tackle my howling laughter. The programme began with Paul, the Tourette’s sufferer, and I wept hysterically at the hilarious and wild things he kept shouting, such as: “Baby Jesus loved petrol stations!”, “Frank Spencer ain’t real!” and “I’m made of cats and kittens!” This was so weird and utterly random that I couldn’t help but laugh though I make no apology for that.

I’ve had an illness (panic disorder) which has placed me in pitiful and absurd situations, such as being too afraid to go into Asda and hanging around outside at the sliding doors wondering if I could ask someone with a kind face to go in for me. I felt like a teenager outside an off-licence, but I wanted to request a few tins of soup and a packet of pasta, not some Buckie. Looking back at that, I laugh – not at the weak and frightened person I was, but at how absurd it was. I’d argue that laughter is a good tool for helping you overcome the humiliations and awkwardness that these conditions can put you in. Of course, there’s a difference between malicious laughter and the one you invite when you share your weird stories, and my chuckles at Paul’s tics weren’t malicious; I’d even say they were fuelled by me sharing a tiny bit of his anxiety.

So the programme hauled me from sobbing laughter to anxiety and compassion and then threw me headlong into anger as it’s viciously unfair that people – not just right-wing Tories but judgemental people – will see Paul as workshy when he simply wants to get a job and bring home a wage for his family.

But what a powerful programme it was, packing in such emotion into one short hour. I loved it so much I watched it twice.

Food programming took a pleasant turn on Channel 4 this week with two new shows which were about the enjoyment of food, rather than the hidden dangers of sugars and fats and how it’s not safe anymore to even nibble a lettuce leaf. The Food Chain (C4, Monday) and Heston’s Dinner In Space (C4, Sunday) were educational, telling us what our meals are composed of and where they come from, but they both inspired you to bounce into your own kitchen and rustle up dinner whereas other food documentaries would have you venturing into the kitchen on tiptoe, a towel clamped over your face lest you breathe in any of the bad fumes from the packets of poison stored in your cupboard.

Heston’s programme put to shame those who moan they’ve got no time to cook, and that it’s all so hard and difficult to arrange. Not so – if he can create something which can be prepared and eaten in outer space then I’m sure everyone else can manage a simple stew or soup.

And The Food Chain showed us where food comes from but did so without guilt. Not everything on the supermarket shelves is from a miserable battery hen or a field soaked in toxic pesticides. In our anxious age it’s a very novel thought, but perhaps not everything is bristling with risk?

I welcomed the new series Scotland: The Promised Land (BBC2, Wednesday) as it manages to bring us Scottish social history without the obligatory drumming Braveheart-style music or the madly irritating Neil Oliver stamping his way across hills and heather as he over-enunciates to the camera. The various historians on this show were less forceful than he tends to be and allowed the story to come forth. The contributors are not the stars here, and their names are not in the title. It’s not about them, it’s about how Scotland’s people created the modern nation.