Rewind TV: OK! TV; The British Academy Film Awards; the Brit Awards; Champions League Football; Dispatches: Lessons in Hate and Violence

Fun was absent from the Baftas and the Brits but neither was as vacuous as OK! TV
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James Corden, Brits
Brit Awards host James Corden: 'a cavernous silence followed everything he said'. Photograph: Getty Images

OK!TV (Channel 5) | Demand 5

The British Academy Film Awards (BBC1) | iPlayer

The Brit Awards (ITV1) | ITV Player

Champions League Football (Sky Sports 2) | skyplayer

Dispatches: Lessons in Hate and Violence (C4) | 4oD

What is Channel 5 for? It's 14 years now since Britain's fifth and last terrestrial channel was launched and few among us could answer that question with any feeling of confidence. If you wanted to know about Islamic extremists, the very fat, or those people who are too bashful to visit their doctor about a vaginal rash or haemorrhoids and so prefer to display their condition on national television, then you'd rightly turn to Channel 4. But what, other than a faulty remote control, takes viewers to Channel 5?

The latest owners of the channel, who also own OK! magazine, hope that OK! TV will provide the motivation. Three days before it was due to launch, Denise Van Outen pulled out as co-presenter. Perhaps someone had shown her a script. A lot of celebrity TV is tongue in cheek, and so is OK! TV. Only not that cheek. A sample question to Boy George: "Looking back at all those amazing hits, can you believe what a fabulous career you've had?"

It's on five evenings a week, although I confess I could manage just the one. At the end of 35 minutes in which ex-reality TV contestants mined terrifying new depths of banality, the mystery of what Channel 5 is for was no closer to being solved. In contrast, what – and who – it's not for is more apparent than ever.

Awards ceremonies inhabit a strange universe full of anxious bonhomie and voyeuristic splendour. The idea, determinedly fostered by the presenters, is that simply everyone wants to be there. In reality most people at an awards ceremony would prefer to be anywhere else: in Kabul, perhaps, at home watching Outcasts, or even at home watching an awards ceremony.

This is not just because they're gruellingly drawn-out affairs, but also because most of those in attendance are not up for awards, and most of those who are in the running finish as losers. So while ostensibly celebrations of achievement, such events are actually studies in professional disappointment and, for the rest of us, social exclusion.

The sitting-room sofa should therefore be the ideal vantage point from which to enjoy the proceedings. But watching the British Academy Film Awards and then the Brit Awards, or what OK! TV called "another spectacular celebrity occasion", in rapid succession last week was surely an arduous task even for the kind of red-carpet watchers who tuned into all five of last week's OK! TV shows.

The Baftas began with Paul McCartney giving a thumbs-up to camera – seldom a reassuring sign. "We're going to have a rocking evening," he said. He was wrong. The best hope at these virtual parties lies with the host, but Jonathan Ross was a long way from his best. Despite his d'Artagnan-like facial hair arrangement, there was nothing cavalier about a performance by which even the most trigger-happy Tweeter would have struggled to be offended.

At one stage Ross quipped that the audience could relax because Ricky Gervais had not been invited. And with his health and safety approach to his intro and links, Ross was a kind of anti-Gervais. Where once the former BBC mega-earner used to trade on a risqué charm, he was keen to display a new family-friendly, Daily Mail-placating, ageing-sitcom-actor-respecting Sachs-appeal. It was less a comedy act than an act of contrition. If nothing else, it had the unusual effect of making you look forward to the acceptance speeches.

Although presenters can have a "good Baftas", the job of host at the Brits is one that can only be judged by degrees of failure. Success is not an option. Held in the aircraft-hangar ambience of London's O2, it boasts monumental sets, vast crowds and what the announcer referred to as "members of the pop star community". The speeches were a succession of "iwannafankus" and "big-ups". And after Take That opened the evening with a floor show that seemed to be a critique of totalitarian dystopias, but may just have been an opportunity to wear matching double-breasted car coats, the room for ridicule was as spacious as the venue.

Yet the affable James Corden opted instead to focus his teasing on the 16-year-old Justin Bieber, who was allotted the role of a kind of joke mascot. It sounded like the O2 audience didn't appreciate the joke, because a cavernous silence followed everything Corden said. Whether that was due to bad acoustics or good taste is anyone's guess.

Another target of Corden's humour was the pair of disgraced football pundits, Richard Keys and Andy Gray, who were ousted from Sky after making sexist comments off-camera. In recent weeks they've been designated number one national villains, particularly by that most sensitive and feminist cadre of men: newspaper sports writers.

However, while not wishing to skip over Keys's and Gray's behaviour, it's time someone mentioned that they were in fact pretty accomplished at their jobs. In Gray's case, you need only listen to his replacements to gain a sense of the insight, knowledge and personality he brought to football commentary. In Champions League Football Ray Wilkins, a man who has perfected the understated cliche ("that was a timely intervention"), showed just how quickly he can read a game, once he's studied the slow-motion replay several times.

With Gray, action replays would almost always confirm his initial opinion. With Wilkins, they either contradicted it – "He was offside, no question about it… And I don't know that he was offside" – or, more often, were the cue for him to make known his opinion for the first time. It's one thing to upbraid an official in real-time for a wrong decision, but it loses a certain moral authority to wait until you've seen the slo-mo close-up twice to start asking how the ref could possibly have missed such a blatant foul.

Gray lost his job because, when he thought he wasn't being filmed, he suggested that women were less competent than men. Four years ago, Dispatches filmed several preachers saying the same thing and much worse, and the people who nearly lost their jobs were the film-makers. Pursued by the police and investigated and finally exonerated by Ofcom, they've come back with Lessons in Hate and Violence, an undercover exposé of a couple of lauded faith schools.

It wasn't quite as strong, but it did feature one particularly memorable moment in which a speaker warned students to stay away from men with less than a "fistful of beard" the "same way you would stay away from a serpent or a snake". These men, he explained, were even less trustworthy "than a Jew". The imagery and phrasing sounded familiar but I couldn't place it. And then it came to me: it was pure Borat. The gratifying lesson is that however much the pious seek legal safeguards against mockery, they remain powerless against their greatest comic threat. They can't protect themselves from themselves.

Elephant: Life after Death (C4), in which a camera captured the gradual consumption and deterioration of an elephant's carcass, amounted to a whole new genre that might be called necrobiology. At first, no animal seemed much interested in feasting on five tons of dead elephant, but eventually a lone hyena turned up and surveyed the impenetrable hide. Where to make the first bite? Suddenly, like some overexcited OK! TV interviewer, the hyena buried its head in the pachyderm's anus, right up to its neck. As a snapshot of the food chain, it undoubtedly shed new light on the term bottom feeder.

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