Prison eh? Full of, like, criminals, hard-working staff, and eugh, awful smells and that whole overcrowding thing. But guys, why make the clink grim? Anyone remember Rachel Coughlan’s Women on the Edge (BBC Two) in February, which went behind the walls of Styal prison in Cheshire? Man, that was bleak, full of grit and everyday tragedy. In House of Crime, thought BBC Three, we’ll make prison fun. Put it on post-pub, one for the lads.

Chris Rushton’s documentary was garish, flip, and narrated in a stupendously inappropriate, languorous drawl by Max Beesley. You wanted to applaud the programme-makers’ audacity at trying to relate a difficult subject in a fresh, original format, but was it really wise to treat the issue of prison life with the same laddish lightness as an FHM piece on a night out in Magaluf? After all, the issues facing the staff and inmates of HMP Birmingham (Winson Green) are much the same as Styal: “cutters”, attempted hangings, overcrowding, prisoners defecating over cells in “dirty protests”.

Maybe BBC Three has decided to target an audience of right-leaning, reactionary twentysomethings. But when we first encountered the guy smearing his cell walls with faeces, was it editorially sound to tell us he was doing it because he didn’t feel he was getting the right drugs for a leg infection, and extrapolate from that: “Imagine if we did this when the doctor gave us aspirin rather than paracetamol.” Of his cell, Beesley joked: “It’s like one of the cleaner toilets at Glastonbury.”

The documentary not only focused on the prison officers, it took on their perspective. Good guy Phil Chamberlain helped bad lag “Wild Wilko” clean himself up. When one prisoner barricaded himself in the cell, Beesley told us he “saw sense” when confronted by a battalion of officers: “Well you would, wouldn’t you.” Besides the blokiness, there was the clunkingly ironic use of well-known arias from operas including The Magic Flute played over sequences of drudgey prison life. High culture versus subculture, y’see.

Mike Shann, the governor, rode a motorbike. Victoria Jones, his ambitious deputy, wanted her own jail and worried about the possibility of breaking a heel on her new boots if a violent prisoner tried to attack her. More bafflingly, Victoria drove Mike to and from the airport for a holiday to California. They kissed goodbye, kissed hello again and he patted her bum. When the “dirty” protester was moved to a Cardiff jail, Beesley said it would be unlikely if he found work “as a painter decorator”, hoho, and pitied anyone “putting washing out downwind” of his new home. Yes, fresh, original . . . and shallow and unpleasant. Next, Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee go to Iraq.

To prove the best stories are told direct, Lizzie Wingham’s Lucky, Loaded and Lost (BBC Three) followed, in colourful detail, what happened when a young couple, Roger and Lara Griffiths, won the Lottery. Roger tried to restart his music career. Lara had a serious bag addiction which their £1.8 million win could barely sate. Roger became unhappy. They didn’t, as they hoped, become celebrities. They argued with the toxic intensity of two people who can’t do without one another (“You told me ‘Give me a baby’”; “I would never say that”): Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf comes to Boston Spa.

However, this wasn’t a simple money-can’t-buy-happiness morality tale: Roger and Lara found that you couldn’t live off £1.8 million. He had to go back to work. They couldn’t afford their dream home. Their most attractive quality was the plain, brazen way they enjoyed their wealth and endured the comedown. They weren’t crude, just shockingly honest, and the documentary was insightful, intimate and very funny. “I want to be an ambassador for Louis Vuitton,” said Lara. You loved them loving it, and — Wingham’s real achievement — really felt for them trapped on the other side of the looking glass.

Emily Shields’s Fat Beauty Contest (Channel 4) lacked such soul and inquiry, which was odd given the material: a group of women rediscover a sense of self-respect celebrating their plus-size weight in a beauty pageant. But it was bitty and uneven, with the participants and the contest organiser Charlotte Coyle reduced to spouting ridiculous empowerment speak — “You’re gorgeous. You’re fantastic” — over and over again.

There was no consideration of it being a bit of a freak show and no interrogation of the most glaring anomaly. If Coyle was challenging stereotypical assumptions about women and appearance, why do it under the sexist, utterly retrograde umbrella of a beauty contest?

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