I BELIEVE it was Nick the Greek who said, "The next best thing to playing and winning, is playing and losing". I believe this because somebody told me during the course of Channel 4's documentary on gambling, £50 Says You'll Watch This. Apart from having one of the greatest TV show titles of all time, this three-part programme was run over consecutive nights, instantly endearing itself to TV columnists across the land.

It was hosted by Hardeep Singh Kohli, a Sikh from Glasgow and an avowed betting enthusiast. He set out with £7,000 of "his own money" on a gambling adventure across the world. Well, Britain and Vegas. Kohli was a charming host, although not quite as drily amusing as he appeared to think. He certainly didn't have the requisite charm to make bad grammar funny, calling Las Vegas the "most gamblingest city in the world" and more than once using a variation on the line "more glitz and glamour than a. . em glitzy glamorous thing", causing the more itchy triggerfingered to be tempted towards the re-runs of Blackadder on UKTV Gold.

Similarly, he was not the gambling expert he had convinced himself he just might be, which seemed to make him the ideal host for a show that investigated how gambling has now entered the mainstream in Britain. If you'll indulge us the downmarket phraseology, a whopping £53bn is being wagered by the clued up and the clueless each year across the water, with more than 70% of the population admitting to being regular gamblers.

Kohli had none of the hallmarks of a sports bettor, his fix was poker, which he claimed to play every Sunday with friends. These 'friends', once we sat in on a game, were seemingly made up of comedians, writers, actors, and TV presenters, a low-key luvvie-in of ridiculous proportions. I'm not saying these people don't socialise, but they clearly weren't friends, not in the true sense of the word. How do I know? They showed each other their hands after they had bluffed. Real friends would never do that.

Kohli then set off for the States to take part in a poker-based reality TV show.

He was clearly out of his depth against proven professionals and, after losing his first game, used the F-word in frustration. The rest of the table winced in embarrassment, with one player, Phil Laak, becoming downright hostile, hoping that his mother wouldn't have to hear such language. Considering the reality show clearly wasn't live, presumably his mother has some sort of deadly aversion to beeping noises. Of course, it may all have been a charade, designed to humiliate Kohli and put him off whatever game he had. If so, it worked extremely well. If not, what a bunch of dicks, and I hope Laak's mother is reading this.

Kohli also managed to be humiliated by an upper-class backgammon group ("The superior player will always triumph, " said their leader, in a voice that could colonise lesser countries in an instant) and an unsavoury millionaire poker player, who bet Kohli $1000 that he wouldn't walk into his pool fully clothed, right up to his turban. Whatever sympathy I had for our host was lost when he visited the home of Brian Zimbik, a man who once had breast implants for a $100,000 bet (he still has them, and if you've seen them you probably haven't slept since either). Zimbik challenged Kohli to a game of table tennis for money, with Kohli believing the claim that his opponent wasn't very good. Zimbik, of course, was a table tennis teacher and had beaten a world champion.

Kohli got soundly spanked, only later noticing the table tennis training machine in the corner.

How this guy got £7,000 in the first place is anybody's guess.

Finally, and to the programme's credit, they went in search of gambling's darker side, speaking to a man who had bankrupted four businesses and tried to commit suicide because of his compulsion. We were also given a horrifying peek into the world of the slot zombies, those in Vegas who can spend days vacantly pumping change into machines in the hope of a payout. One man had come to Vegas with a wife and $7,000, and now had little more than his baseball cap and moustache. He was doing labour for $35 a day, just enough to give him a few more bits of change to feed the monster.

As a professor of gambling pointed out, with all the psychological tactics that casinos employ through sound and vision, these people aren't constantly losing, they're constantly nearly winning.

There were some brief fascinations as Kohli looked at the science of the fixation, discovering that a certain channel of the brain was being utilised, producing dopimine - the same channel, incidentally, that heroin and nicotine wander up once they get inside your head. There were also claims that the frowns traditionally fixed upon gambling are derived from the Protestant work ethic, the idea of somebody rich becoming poor overnight and vice versa being seen as a threat to a stable society.

Ultimately though, the programme was a busted flush. It might have benefitted from a three-week run, as the repetition from show to show became more than a little irritating. The hardened gambler would have discovered nothing new, while the casual punter might have found three hours tough going; the whole hour devoted to poker being particularly indulgent.

It would have taken a serious personality to carry this, and Kohli, though occasionally amusing, didn't quite have it. Better luck next time.