"Go into the city.” That is broadcaster, writer and film-maker Jonathan Meades’ advice to any young film-maker wanting to start out in documentaries.

As one of the big names running a masterclass in film as part of this year’s See Festival programme, it is likely there will be more advice to come – although whether it will be in a similar vein is impossible to predict.

Jonathan made his name as a journalist and restaurant critic for the The Times in the 1980s and 1990s, while at the same time building up a reputation as an idiosyncratic television auteur.

Over the course of more than 50 shows he has developed a distinctive style, which keeps his besuited and shades-wearing figure at the centre of the action in the strangest of situations, as he talks about subjects ranging from architecture, surrealism and culture.

His highly intelligent films seem at odds with the supposedly dumbed-down television being thrown at today’s public – and unsurprisingly he admits he finds it difficult to get his ideas green-lit.

“I fling them a whole lot of ideas, then sit back and forget about them,” he says.

“I just wait for them to say yes or no. I think if you are desperately passionate about an idea that becomes a problem.

“If you have made a living from writing anything, from journalism to fiction, you don’t put all your eggs in one basket – you have to have other things that you can be doing.”

Part of the problem has been the changes at the BBC, with ideas no longer simply being approved by heads of department – leading to something like the development hell situation film-makers face in Hollywood.

“Now it’s all done by endless committees, which means that basically we get the lowest common denominator television,” says Jonathan. “They pump huge amounts of money into things like David Dimbleby’s How We Built Britain, which was drivel. It felt like it had been written by a team of researchers.

“On every aspect of architecture there was no originality or indication that anyone had actually thought about anything – they had taken the standard issue on everything.”

Part of Jonathan’s approach to filmmaking, and what makes his work so watchable, is his singular vision.

“I don’t give a toss about the audience,” he says. “Anything that is really good will find its own audience. Trying to second-guess an audience is another way of making dreadful television. Television executives don’t realise the public aren’t as stupid as they think they are. There is an expectation that people are as half-witted as the people who work in the media.”

He doesn’t consider his work documentaries, as he writes them like drama.

“Every word I speak is written by me, and I plan a lot of the shots too,” he says. “There is nothing at all spontaneous in any of my shows – they are all completely mapped out beforehand. In some cases we use storyboards to work out sequences.

“The important thing is to get the script dead right.”

The subjects Jonathan chooses range from those he has a prior knowledge of, to things he thinks would be interesting to shoot and write about.

“It’s more a curiosity of wanting to find out about various things,” he says.

His most recent series was the BBC Four three-part show Off Kilter, which saw him explore Scotland in his own idiosyncratic way.

“That took nine months from beginning to end to create 180 minutes of television,” he says. “I started by making a long list of subjects and driving around Scotland for four or five weeks, looking at things and working out how I was going to fit stuff together.

“It’s quite a slow process. There were various things I would like to have filmed.

I would love to have shot Inverness and the small towns in the North such as Elgin and Keith. Often they have something which is visually very special, but there isn’t much to say about it.”

Off Kilter had an even longer gestation period than most, with Jonathan first coming up with the idea in the early 1990s.

And there are still plenty of ideas he would like to explore – including Ben Building, an investigation of Italian architecture under Fascist leader Mussolini, which would follow his 1994 film Jerry Building about Nazi architecture and 2006’s Joe Building, which looked at the constructions in Stalin’s Russia.

While he waits to see if anything will happen with that idea, he can still fall back on his career as a writer, both as a critic and an author of fiction, with the novels The Fowler Family Business and Pompey.

Time has not dulled his caustic observations about architecture and the modern world from his current home in France.

“Whenever I walk through the City of London, or the Olympic area, which looks like Brasilia, I think, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if there was a moratorium on architecture’,” he says.

“I find it very hard to get excited about British or French architecture – most of the interesting stuff is happening in Holland or Spain. There is a terrible lack of imagination in Britain, especially in domestic building. It is really awful, almost as awful as France.

“We only live two and a half hours from the Spanish border, and when you go over into the Basque country it gets better immediately.

I think it is a humane modernism which Britain was never very good at.

“Instead there has been a shying away of modernism into a slow venacular of new urbanism and executive estates which look crass. And the sort of Prince Charles retro stuff is pitiful really.”

Jonathan Meades will be in discussion with Toby Amies at 11am.