BARCELONA v CHELSEA ITV, Tuesday THE TRUTH ABOUT REFEREES ITV, Tuesday NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED RTE Two, Thursday FIRST off, a couple of questions about ITV's Champions League coverage. What year is it again? Are we still in the era when all of the Queen's subjects are bally well behind the English champions as they go to foreign fields to give Klaus and Manuel a damn good thrashing? ITV still feel the need to cheerlead for the English side in their live coverage which, in this day and age, seems bizarre.

C'mawn, this is Chelsea for crying out loud. Most people watching the game on Tuesday night, here and across the water, were delighted for Barcelona. Yet ITV felt obliged to behave as if the viewer's relatives had been brushed aside by Ronnie and co. Odd and outdated.

The Truth About Referees was the portentous title of the programme that followed, a documentary that was abysmal, even for ITV. In case you missed it, and hug the person nearest to you in gratitude if you did, the truth is refereeing isn't a very nice job.

Just ask Anders Frisk, the referee who recounted his ordeal of being called a cheat by Jose Mourinho after Barcelona v Chelsea last season and subsequently receiving death threats from moronic people who seemed to think they were Chelsea fans.

While telling us nothing that anybody with a vague interest in the story didn't already know, the producers also helpfully showed samples of the garbage being written about Frisk on internet message boards, which must have been heartily enjoyed by the fools who composed them.

We then met a 13-year-old who held the distinction of being the youngest person ever to receive a ban from the FA after headbutting another child. But what, you may legitimately cry, has this got to do with referees? Absolutely nothing. In the grand tradition of reality television, this kid was simply wheeled out for the public's all-pervasive need to point and gawp. Just another in the list of dirty houses, harridan wives, overweight denial addicts, compulsive spenders and unpleasant children, all available to us every evening to indulge our fantasies about what we are not.

His dad had deluded himself with the extraordinary notion that his son might not be the same player if his attitude became a tad more civil. By the way, at no point was it alleged that this lad was any good at football. This wasn't Wayne Rooney's successor here. Just a kid with a scarily indulgent father. A sports psychologist was sent the tape of the dipstick da and his ray of sunshine.

He decided that the father's analysis of the situation might be flawed. Hopefully he didn't get paid too much.

Our mental expert also maintained that people do things because they find them pleasurable. Ergo, setting out on a cold Sunday morning with whistle in hand to be abused by fans at a nothing football match might not be the most popular activity.

We didn't hear from him after that, which was a shame. He may have had some startling revelations about people's habit of eating when they become hungry; or their tendency to breathe in order to avoid death.

A certain bookmaker provided the venue for this week's edition of No Experience Required, where some everyday punters tried to land their dream job, this one being a sports trader. Let's call the company Bookie X because, well, they've probably had enough free advertising for one week.

Making the job of trader out to be like some form of air traffic control, the company gave the impression that their guys pluck the odds off the tops of their heads while a soccer match is ongoing, trying to maintain that it's some sort of battle of wits between the punter and the traders. The fact is that mathematics and technology do most of the work. It was the guy most comfortable with numbers who landed the gig, despite losing the company (virtual) money on his big test. And crass is a word that doesn't quite do justice to the moment when one of the wannabes was sent out to find the best odds possible for a treble bet and stood before the camera reciting like an infant, "I would have got 5,400 from [Bookie A], 4,450 in [Bookie B] whereas if I did it with [Bookie X] myself it'd be 6,545. Quite a difference there!" It's a wonder their phone number didn't appear on screen.

This is nothing against the show itself, it was entertaining and wellproduced. But then, a lot of ads are.