Two things in Russia are fairly constant. First, there is the scale. In St Petersburg I stayed in an average chain-style hotel that was like a ziggurat for alien giants, its footprint spread over roughly 4% of the world’s crust, spooling down into sub floors and bunkers and swimming lagoons, upper floors dusted with rock deposits from the rings of Saturn.

Everything is massive. It’s also, and this is crucial, very far away.

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History suggests being the biggest country on the planet has never been a straightforward affair. There is no easy mechanism for governing and unifying a nation that reaches from the Black Sea to the steppe, a space so large the German commanders at Stalingrad advised their men not to look at it, afraid of its weirdly melancholic effects, the sense of staring into some endless scrolling abyss.

Talking of which, on Russian TV this week was Peter Schmeichel, a man who also spends a lot of time staring, hypnotised, at some haunting spectacle just out of sight, tribute no doubt to the space and light of the Russian sky, that endless distance, and the difficulty of reading an autocue to camera.

Yes, I watched the World Cup on RT so you don’t have to. Or at least that is how I thought this was going to pan out. In practice it was not quite like that. It turns out the real genius of RT, the Kremlin’s state-funded English language station, is its unexpected tone and texture. It’s actually good!

It’s fun! Or at least, it’s not un-good, not un-fun. And not, in the end, unfamiliar either.

The Schmeichel show, along with the Stan Collymore show and the astonishingly visceral punditry of José Mourinho are the chief pegs of RT’s World Cup programming. At first glance it’s a deliciously glossy product.

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Even RT’s World Cup intro film is a thing of luminous beauty, cut with mind-numbing shots of Russian ballerinas curling themselves into swan’s neck shapes and doing beautifully rippling slow‑motion keep-ups. All of which is only slightly spoiled by a sudden shot of that familiar silvery power-bouffant, the triumphant sneer of the great José, trying hard to seem welcoming and nice but still looking like he would beat you into submission with an ivory shoehorn if he could only be bothered – now please leave his penthouse shark aquarium.

The latest Schmeichel show opens with a similarly gorgeous shot of our host, windswept on a rooftop in Moscow in a luminous blue jacket and open neck shirt. Before long we cut to a bewilderingly long interview with Johannes Holzmüller of Fifa’s VAR department. Holzmüller talks about four pillars of intervention and, defining the parameters of the attacking phase, while the camera pans back to Pete in advancing stages of tedium, a journey in a few short cuts from initial beaming interest, to twitchiness, to a final state of haggard seat-slumping agony.

Later, buried weirdly behind the VAR man, Schmeichel interviews the real, actual Gianni Infantino and to his credit guns for Fifa’s president over the workings of VAR. Not that he gets far. Infantino has an indolent glaze of power about him these days. He shrugs and says those who doubt VAR only do so because they are bitter about losing a match, which is a very Fifa way of looking at things. Bad news is simply fake news.

Nothing is true.

The other big ticket show is of course Collymore. I like Collymore as a broadcaster. He does his research, is properly informed, and makes an agreeable contrast with the appallingly shoddy prep of some famous former pro pundits. The show is good too, the best bit an adoring interview with Xavi, during which Collymore gazes at the master of the ball with a broad, sensual smile, like a starving man peering down at a bowl of fresh custard.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stan Collymore, seen here at the launch of his RT football show in October 2017. Photograph: Fiona Hanson

Quite what it all means is another question. The standard liberal-style take on RT is that it uses straight programming and familiar faces to conceal its more pointed messages. So while Stan is bringing us a film about the Street Child World Cup the on-screen text says TRUMP ADMITS CRIMEA TO BE RUSSIAN.

As Schmeichel is speaking in a slow, placatory tone from his rooftop, looking like the notorious playboy president of a central European republic explaining by video message why he’s stolen the central bank funds, the scroll reads US ANNOUNCES WITHDRAWAL FROM UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL.

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Does any of this matter? Again, it is perhaps an issue of scale, and of difference. Television has been a key tool of government since perestroika. Television helped Boris Yeltsin into office. A televised war transformed Vladimir Putin into an all-round man of destiny. Putin says he wants to wrest the global voice of news from its dominant “Anglo-Saxon” tone. And yes RT is clearly a mouthpiece for approved facts and state influence, there to punt a worldview across the satellite space. But do you trust Fox News? Is the BBC really representing the views of people in Rostov or Iran?

As for Collymore, the usual objection is that for all his no doubt well-founded complaints about institutional racism he works for a state broadcaster in an oppressive regime. And yet, once again: scale. Russia will end up wherever it’s heading from a significantly different base-point. And Collymore is still the only prominent black person I’ve seen on television since I have been here.

The hope with events like this is that the sheer force of human variety, the presence of the world in the flesh can offer something else, an unplanned transformative energy. For now we have set of surfaces that are compelling, colourful, distantly glossy; it is as Pete would say “really, really cool”.