The hostess ushered me into the vast, open-plan Serengeti of her Notting Hill home. “Everybody’s out in the garden,” she said, then, with a knowing roll of the eyes, added: “If you want to watch the football, it’s on in the kitchen.” There, I found the Euro-maquis, that dedicated group of hard men who resist society, conversation and sophistication to watch football. Although why it’s preferable to be henpecked and disappointed by a lot of millionaire prima donnas in bright nylon rather than their wives, who in Notting Hill are also millionaire prima donnas in bright nylon, I can’t imagine.

I don’t remember who was playing. It didn’t really matter: we watched with a contented excitement. “Isn’t it fantastic,” a publisher said, “not to have England playing?” All of a sudden, it was like last orders in a Welsh pub on benefits day: everyone was shouting at once. How marvellous to enjoy football again, to be like a kid and just love the game. How wonderful to watch each match as a game and not a contest, not some gut-wrenching, jingoistic, willie-waggling competition. We all looked at each other like guilty imams who’d all just admitted to being Barbra Streisand fans. “And the viewing figures are holding up,” a TV executive added.

All the men I’ve spoken to since have said how much more they’re enjoying the football without England’s involvement. One cab driver waxed almost lyrical. He realised, he said, that he has had punctuated thumpings of humiliation, failure and embarrassment all his life. “You have to tense yourself,” he said, “at the beginning of every competition for the inevitable disappointment, but now I can’t wait. The football’s brilliant. Who is it tonight? A holiday destination against ex-commie electricians; or is it the blond bicycling liberals?”

There is an emerging consensus as to why the beautiful game has grown to be better-looking without us. There isn’t the monumental but utterly predictable misery of the early bath, and we haven’t had to put up with the weeks of obsessive speculation about some showboat’s chipped metatarsal, as if it were a relic of a martyred saint. There have been no pages of Wags – apparently, European footballers are either chaste, gay or married to Portuguese sausage-makers – and we don’t have the chronic shame of our fans. We’re also spared the final purgatory of the inevitable penalty shootout. What pleasure to watch Spain v Italy and feel excited but not gutted. No, I think we’ve seen a glimpse of the bright, golden future, and it doesn’t include us.

Now, it’s an idea, just a thought, but why don’t we consider not turning up for the London Olympics, not competing at all, and concentrate on being good hosts, handing round the canapés and medals, enjoying the games? Because you know what it’s going to be like if we try to win stuff. A couple of silvers for sailing, a bronze for a horse, half a dozen gallantly pulled hamstrings and reams and reams and reams of excuses.

The documentary snoop that was Snowdon and Margaret – Inside a Royal Marriage (Wednesday, C4) had that sweatily British attitude we reserve exclusively for royalty and agricultural shows: a smarmy mixture of fawning snobbery, prurient smirking, chippy schadenfreude and smug disapproval. It’s possibly the most complex cocktail of emotions enjoyed by an Englishman, and none of us comes away from a dose of it looking particularly good.

Lord Snowdon is one of the most interesting and influential postwar portrait photographers, and a documentary about his work would have been nice. According to this film, however, the camera was really just a cover for leg-over looseners. It’s like making a programme about Picasso as a randy Spanish artist who used canvas as a cover for infidelity.

The Snowdons’ marriage was probably happy in parts, dull in parts and miserable in parts, like everyone else’s. What you can be sure of was that it wasn’t in the parts that were trawled in front of the camera like the contents of a police cell on a Friday night. The through-the-fingers cringing of the Mills & Boon dramatisation, with real talking heads, made the thing look like an imitation of those photo-love strips with agony-aunt advice they run in the tabloids and teen magazines. Why anyone would agree to talk on television about their friends’ (royal or common) love lives and divorces is beyond me. Yet these occasional stalking documentaries about royal life invariably tell us less about them than they do about us. In particular, our unhealthy relationship with this bizarre, misshapen, elevated family who have been bred like Crufts champions to be the hereditary depositories for our envious curiosity and sadistic pleasure.

Because there was precious little worth watching last week, I had another go at Jews (Wednesday, BBC4). The first episode was really dire, the second, in equal measure, rather wonderful – the trials and sadness of the children of refugees from the holocaust, whose stories have been worn smooth by a familiar sadness and wringing loss. The lucky and traumatised few who managed to escape mainland Europe to make new lives here did their best to assimilate, to camouflage their heritage and hide in the host community, changing their names, denying their Jewishness, leaving their children with complex emotions of inherited guilt, resentment, ruthlessness and mourning. It was all immensely touching and provoked questions about the nature of belonging and nationality, of our responsibility to the future and the obligations of the past. It was powerful programme-making and more than mitigated for its predecessor, but didn’t explain why this one wasn’t shown first.

I’m becoming increasingly frustrated by the declining quality and hyper-style of news interviews. I saw one of the worst last week. Kirsty Wark’s attempted questioning of the Zimbabwean ambassador to the UN on Newsnight was a model of liberal bigotry and shrill, partisan interruptions. She wasn’t interested in eliciting answers or in hearing his observations, she simply wanted to tell him off. It was like the harangue from the back of the students’ union. It was apparently far more important that Wark let us know she was on the side of the Morningside angels than for her to allow a man, invited by the BBC, to speak, albeit in faltering English. Presumably, she was too frightened of being accused of giving him an easy ride by her friends, and chose to forget that it is not the interviewer’s business to be easy or hard, but to illuminate. The guest may choose to lie through his teeth, and you must give him a chance to do so: it’s for the audience to make up its mind. The television studio is not a courtroom; an interviewer is not a barrister or a judge.

There was also the faintest whiff of right-on righteousness in this, as there so often is. African men who are assumed to be tyrants, or apologists for tyrants, get a different level of respect from, say, the Chinese ambassador or a Saudi minister. There is still a charitable, patronising colonialism among the red-nose-ocracy. Wark should be made to stand and watch this interview every morning for a month with her mouth shut as a punishment, and it ought to be taught in media-studies modules as a warning.

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