Of the four on that list, the first two, each in their turn, hoovered up every presenting gig going, before being deemed over-exposed and hauled away to cool off out of the limelight. Now Russell Brand is the telly commissioning person's mug of choice. His star is still in the ascendant, although it remains to be seen how long it is before it starts to fall to earth. His entire image and presenting style is, after all, based on a novelty.

Which brings us to Jonathan Ross, a man whose reign as king of British TV began a little before Norton's and has continued to run concurrently with that of his other challengers. His omnipresence baffles many, and there's no doubt his talents are spread thinly in certain areas.

He's a rubbish film reviewer for the BBC, for instance. But as a chat-show host and presenter of big, televised, live (or as-live) events, he's unsurpassed, intuitively responsive to the whims of live TV, or to what will play well with an audience, without compromising on his own very unique star quality.

Last week seemed to me to be only a slightly exaggerated version of a typical telly week. As usual, Ross was everywhere. First he popped up as the presenter of The Royal Variety Performance, doing a dutiful turn topping and tailing a showcase of what currently passes for the tamer end of live entertainment. Although the irreverence was kept in check as the situation demanded (Prince Charles was sitting in the gods;

plentiful jewellery was being rattled in the stalls), Ross's very presence was enough to give just the tiniest frisson to what was, as always, an excruciatingly obsequious occasion.

The following night, Ross was on more familiar ground, helming The British Comedy Awards 2006 . . . "my second night in a row spent in the presence of Charlie", as he put it early on. "Like Heather Mills leaving Paul McCartney, I'm going out on a limb . . . I don't think it's been a vintage year for British comedy, " came the next part of the introduction, not that he was slow in helping to dish out the awards.

Or to dish it out to any of the guest award-presenters. To Madonna:

"Congratulations on your little black baby." And about Russell Brand, the pretender to his crown:

"The drugs, the women, the lifestyle. The country knows everything about him. Apart from when his new chat show's on." He was on a roll, and by the end of the show, Ross had generated enough forward momentum to carry him through probably the next 50 years of television dominance.

In a previous age, Victoria Wood was considered a pioneer of alternative comedy. Lately, her TV work seems to be taken up with twee dramas about northern English values featuring lots of busy-body women waddling about and sticking their noses into other people's business.

Housewife, 49 was true to recent type . . . but only to a point. On the surface a story of a British housewife's experience of wartime, the home-front setting was really just a backdrop to a tale of a woman who finally comes to realise she's trapped in a cheerless marriage, but is resigned to putting up with it. "We're just people who got married, that's all, " Wood's character, Nella Last, summed it up to her husband, sitting on the far end of a park bench. Suddenly, the adrenalin rush of dodging V2 rockets seemed appealing. Having written the work herself (distilling actual wartime diaries) and distinguished herself in the lead role, it might well be said in a future survey of Victoria Wood's career: This was her finest hour.

Housewife, 49may have left me in a gently melancholic mood for the rest of the evening, but it was nothing as to the fug of existential despair that one Doug Bruce was tipped into when he found himself having to deal with sudden and total memory loss.

The engrossing documentary Unknown White Male examined how Doug went about rediscovering, with wide baby eyes once again, who he was and the nature of the world around him, helped by his friends, who tried to re-introduce him to an earlier version of himself via home movies.

What do you know: the old Doug turned out to be a pouting, arrogant dickhead. "I don't want my previous identity back, " he announced.

And, in a way, you couldn't blame him. Because he'd "reawoken" to find, not only that he lived in a huge and stylish loft apartment in a cool part of New York, but that he had two unbelievably beautiful-looking women pawing over him. What man in his right mind wouldn't want to wake up to that?

Reviewed The Royal Variety Performance Tuesday, BBC1 The British Comedy Awards Wednesday, UTV Housewife, 49, Sunday, UTV Unknown White Male Tuesday, Channel 4