SO HOW was The Eurovision Song Contest (BBC One, Saturday) for you? Perhaps you were too drunk to remember after playing the Eurovision Drinking Game (one shot for bizarre choreography, two shots for a Terry Wogan sartorial comment, etc). Not a vintage year, I think. I’ve been disappointed by so few nonsensical song titles — silliness, after all, is pop’s lasting contribution to music and should be cherished. And with more contestants singing in English, there was less chance to enjoy the Ceefax translation of the foreign-language lyrics, which, with the sound mercifully off, makes the whole event look like some insanely surreal opera.

The term Eurovision is now so synonymous with kitsch that no one would dare to launch a Eurovision Peace Initiative or a Eurovision Poverty Challenge. And since the success of The Da Vinci Code, anything with “code” in the title now sounds conspiratorial; aren’t those hand signals in The Highway Code part of a secret Masonic language? So The Michelangelo Code: Secrets of the Sistine Chapel (Channel 4, Saturday) conjured up expectations of a convoluted conspiracy uncovered through globetrotting detective work involving ancient texts and famous art.

The programme had the travel (Rome, Bologna, Portugal, Israel, Texas), the dusty tomes and Michelangelo at his finest but it turned out to be more of a jigsaw puzzle that, once put together, revealed the papal motives behind getting the artist to paint the Sistine Chapel. The key players here were Pope Sixtus IV, who built the chapel, and his nephew and fellow Franciscan, Pope Julius II, who commissioned the frescoes. Among the clues were their interpretations of biblical prophets, a papal spin doctor’s sermons, a passage from Dante, an ancient map of the world by a flat-earther monk, and the proportions of the chapel matching Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.

“Stick with me, I’ve worked it all out,” said the presenter Waldemar Januszczak, the art critic of The Sunday Times, as if he had all the answers for su doku. Over two hours, he laid out his evidence, then made his conclusion so hastily that he almost threw it away. The Sistine Chapel, it seems, became part of Julius’s efforts to follow biblical prophecy in preparation for the End of Days. The chapel, Januszczak pointed out, is built so that you’re drawn to Michelangelo’s depiction of The Last Judgment in which everyone looks decidedly on edge.

Sadly, we were given few opportunities to fully appreciate Michelangelo’s frescoes themselves. At times, it was like being presented with Constable’s The Hay Wain but only being allowed to see the muddy bits in search of footprints. And there was no one to challenge Januszczak’s theories and judge the freshness of his ideas. He had a God-like presence — for this programme he enjoyed TV’s holy trinity of presenter, director and executive producer — so the chance of getting any counter- argument was as likely as Cyprus giving Turkey 12 Eurovision points.

Januszczak displayed a passionate knowledge, but with it came a slightly irritating hectoring tone and the kind of matey, “Don’t worry, he won’t go all Lord Clark on you” asides and modern parallels that producers think are the only way to make “high art” approachable. Thankfully Michelangelo’s David wasn’t seen dressed in a hoody. But Januszczak did visit the site of the botched 1993 FBI siege in Waco, Texas, where David Koresh ’s Branch Davidian sect members had believed, like Julius, that they were new Messiahs and the harbingers of the world’s end.

There was more gloomy foreboding in Horizon (BBC Two, Sunday), which examined the likelihood that the kind of “mega-thrust earthquake” that caused the Boxing Day tsunami could occur off the coast of America. Science series like this love adding to their portfolios of disaster scenarios, whether its destruction by giant asteroids, melting ice caps, virulent super plagues and a few others I’ve blotted out for a little peace of mind.

Sunday’s Horizon had the obligatory speeded-up clouds scudding across cityscapes and crashing waves reminiscent of Old Spice adverts. This kind of documentary reminds us of the fragility of our lives, but I wish they weren’t always written by Private Fraser from Dad’s Army (“We’re all doomed!”). Instead we need Terry Wogan in Eurovision mode — conveying a fair amount of information but allowing us to laugh at it — so we can at least sleep at night.

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