Kids today, eh? Running through the subway necking cyan booze cola; slaying each other for their Sony PSPs; hanging round Facebook getting into trouble; eating tubfuls of meow-meow with a stolen spoon. No sense of social responsibility; no sense of nuffink. Kids today, eh?

Maybe not. I suspect the image of teen life we're presented with is warped beyond all recognition. Don't know about you, but my teenage years bore about as much relation to the pleasure-seeking abandon of Skins as Kenny Rogers does to an egg-and-cress sandwich. I'd go to tame parties and pretend I was drunk. On a really wild night, I might actually get to kiss a girl – with tongues. That was about as Roman as it got (and, uh, when I say "Roman", I'm referring to the hedonism of ancient Rome, not Roman Polanski).

Maybe it's because I grew up amid tranquil countryside. Once a news crew came to the local market town to shoot a short piece about small-town yobbery. Two friends of mine saw the cameras and decided to walk past, yelling and tottering about as though they were pissed, which they weren't because it was the middle of the afternoon. They were duly cut into the report as evidence of the depth of the problem.

Teenagers love to exaggerate. Specifically, they love to exaggerate about how mad and lawless their lives are. They'll tell you half their schoolmates are pregnant. That two-thirds of them carry guns. That all of them carried out the Great Train Robbery. In reality, each generation is probably just about as kerrr-azy as the last. The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

I bring this up – all of it – because teenage depravity, or lack of it, forms the premise of Amish: The World's Squarest Teenagers (Sun, 8pm, C4), a fish-out-of-water documentary series in the mode of 2008's superb Meet The Natives in which members of an obscure tribe mingled with various British social groups and recorded their observations. This time round, five Amish teens are dispatched to the UK in a bid to prove that – hey! – people are kinda different and kinda the same and gollygosh whoodathunkit?

For the first episode, they're whisked to south London to hang around with a group of street dancers and the occasional ex-gang member. The Amish kids stand out a little in the hood, with their olde-worlde hats and stiff religious backgrounds. And that's the point.

The results are predictably amusing, but in unpredictable ways. Rather than recoiling in horror at the godless lifestyles on display, the Amish kids are largely perplexed and a touch disappointed. For instance, when the London lads sit around indoors playing videogames, their Amish counterparts quickly grow unbelievably bored. Why? Because they'd rather be outside in the barn, fixing tools and carrying out chores. "But there is no barn," they sigh.

In one excruciating sequence, the street-dance crew perform their act – a full-blown Britain's Got Talent number – for the benefit of the Amish, who stare at them with expressions of blank disinterest; not even unimpressed, they're merely confused as to why they've bothered. It's the best critique of street dance I've ever seen.

Things warm up after that, and the show becomes more thoughtful; in one particularly interesting sequence the Amish visit a mosque, and we see their initial suspicion and disapproval melt into an understanding of common ground. They also teach some estate kids the art of needlepoint.

On the whole, it walks the line between gentle nose-tweaking and fresh perspective very well. The only problem is working out how Channel 4 can follow this up. They've already brought tribesmen and devout teens to sample the rough side of Britain. Are there any other groups left in the world who haven't already been exposed to western decadence? Nomads? Eskimos? Moonmen? Clangers? Clangers in Droitwich. Now that I would watch.