Exactly one year ago, with the Olympics in full swing, British people briefly reclaimed patriotism. We wrestled it from the hands of the racists and the loonies and the politicians and the Keep Calm and Carry On poster manufacturers who'd spent decades sullying it to their own nefarious ends. During the Olympics, for the shortest of moments, it wasn't weird to love your country.

That's over now, of course. And here's I Love My Country to prove it. If you view Saturday teatime TV as a giant game of chicken between BBC1 and ITV to see who can make the most wilfully awful television possible without actually killing anyone – which is probably true – then I Love My Country may just be match point. In a year that's already brought us atrocities such as Splash! and The Voice and Britain's Brightest and Your Face Sounds Familiar, I Love My Country stands out as being almost unsurpassably terrible. It's not even terrible in an entertaining way. It just makes you feel sad for everyone involved.

If you missed it on Saturday, I Love My Country – a rejigged version of a Dutch format – is a sort of Ukip Question of Sport. It's a panel show where everyone competes to prove how uncontrollably brimming with patriotic fervour they are. The set is a muddle of painfully obvious British iconography: a phone box here, a Stonehenge there, some plastic cows. It looks like the final scene of Planet of the Apes would if the monkeys had got confused and colonised a Heathrow duty-free concession by accident. There's also a Big Ben, twirling its hands so fast that an hour whizzes by in seconds. Which is weird, because it felt like the exact opposite was true.

Presenter Gabby Logan – who, after being the co-host of Splash! should probably have a stern word with her agent – seems to understand what a train wreck I Love My Country is. She overcompensates as aggressively as she can, by whooping and dancing relentlessly at every possible opportunity. It's almost as if she's terrified that we'll see the show for what it is if she stops moving. Her dedication can't be faulted, but it's like watching the Tarantella scene from A Doll's House, if Ibsen happened to suffer from a berserk infatuation with the Carry On films.

The rounds in I Love My Country are especially unimaginative. There's a Name That Tune rip-off, a Pin the Tail on the Donkey rip-off, a rip-off of that exploding waterbomb game you used to be able to buy from Argos for a tenner, a Generation Game rip-off and one round that pretty much just involves people just absentmindedly spinning a wheel for points. It's hard to say for sure, but I think I Love My Country is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. That's not how it seems, though. It seems like laziness passed off as irony because nobody could be bothered to do a better job.

The strangest thing is that everyone on-screen is much better than this. Splash! aside, Gabby Logan is a good broadcaster. Frank Skinner and Micky Flanagan are good comedians. Susanna Reid is a great newsreader. Fatboy off EastEnders exists. But I Love My Country is such an abject mess that it sucks everybody down to its level. Watching it feels like being the only sober person on a train carriage full of screaming dayglow hen-party idiots on a journey that never ends. It represents a shameful underestimation of the British public's intelligence. Nobody watching this is anywhere near as stupid as the producers think they are. Even if you haven't loved your country since the Olympics, you have to agree that its inhabitants deserve better than this.