Tribal Wives BBC2, 9pm
Wife Swap USA Channel 4, 11.05pm

As Tribal Wives attested, 800 lovely people live in palm-roofed huts on one of the tiny coral San Blas Islands just off Panama's coast. Members of the Kuna tribe, they live their lives in easeful acceptance of nature. "That is how it is," goes the refrain to a Kuna prayer chant.

The Kuna spend their days in communal harmony, performing humble everyday domestic chores: husking coconuts, fishing, sleeping in hammocks, that sort of thing.

On a philosophical level, they believe that bad dreams are harmful, wrought by bad spirits. The Kuna tribe ward off bad spirits with herbal infusions or whittled wooden figurines called nuchus: little men who come to life at night and drive nightmares away. Female members of the Kuna tribe have an additional task: sewing themselves colourful blouses, or mola, which act as a record of/advert for each blouse-wearer. Into this desert-island idyll, unchanged for centuries, came busy bee Sass, a now-a-go-go thirtysomething from Oxford. Local government officer; keen rower; voluntary worker. Despite her propensity for forced-sounding chuckles, Sass was sad. Something was missing from her modern-day life.

Sass kept confiding her personal lifestyle woes into a green-lit night-vision camera. It was like seeing Bridget Jones on nocturnal manoeuvres with the Royal Marine Father Confessor Regiment.

Sass lacked blokely satisfaction, for sure. She was unhappy about her lack of a mother, too, mater having cruelly exited 21 years previously after Sass had opted to live with her father in the immediate aftermath of her parents' divorce.

Bonding with the Kuna, Sass sewed her first bit of mola on to her trouser leg rather than her blouse. She chortled a little too heartily over her mistake. Thankfully, Sass was soon being mothered by the perceptive and generous Ana Lida, aged 55, married for 40 years, looking like a 70-year-old.

"She laughs a lot to hide her feelings," Ana Lida pronounced of Sass, sagely, going on to shower her adopted daughter with unstinting praise. An emaciated figure with a gap-toothed grin and a ring in her nose, Ana Lida soon got to the root of Sass's problems: she needed a good bloke.

A special party, or chicha, would sort it. Ana Lida and the rest of the Kuna womenfolk burnt some maize, then chewed it to give it a spitty extra kick, before sugar was added for fermentation.

Next, red dye was daubed on Sass's cheeks in jolly circles. She was forced into a too-tight mola, which split right up the side-seams. Ana Lida drank the burnt maize grog and got scarily steamboats, cackling and singing like all the other Kuna women. Pipes were smoked. Sass's head reeled. Sass didn't get what Ana Lida had promised her - "Men will carry you to your hammock" - but she did end up feeling better about being Sass.

Still, I couldn't help thinking she could have got the exact same therapy via a night's interaction with many of the residents of Glasgow. The tribal world: it's smaller than you think.

Wife Swap USA found a family of doofuses from Florida interacting angrily with a family of doofuses from Kentucky. The best moment came when Kentucky pa doofus sought to rid himself of Florida ma doofus (she was a new-age psychic who believed in extra-terrestrials and getting her sons to tap-dance in matching pink-spotted waistcoats and little bowler hats).

As he memorably spat: "You and your hokey-pokey bullcrap - you're kooky!" Yup, there's no place like America today. Yee-haw!