You wouldn’t have seen it from the sofa, but at Earls Court during the ad breaks they showed footage from the 2007 Brits. A Snow Patrol turn here, a sludgy Oasis number there.

It was almost as though they were trying to remind us how rubbish last year was by comparison. And, indeed, 2008 represented a significant improvement. With nary a tousled, furrow-browed hawker of indie power ballads to be seen, the Brits was left free to remind us what a wonderful thing subtlety-free, grab-you-by-the-jugular pop music can be.

The visual theme for the evening was Glam v Punk – with one stage representing each. But some of the best performances of the evening fell into neither category. On the “Glam” stage, The Gossip’s Beth Ditto formalised her departure from the alternative arena by duetting with Mika, while on the “Punk” stage Rihanna colluded with Klaxons over a live mash-up of Umbrella and Golden Skans.

At a ceremony presented by the Osbournes, it could all have been so much worse. Ozzy, said by Sharon to be “weeing himself with excitement”, wiggled his ageing legs in a manner that suggested he really was. But the feared car crash never materialised, because he scarcely did.

Sharon swore at Vic Reeves as he struggled to remember the award he was presenting but the real frisson of irreverence came from double winners Arctic Monkeys, who dressed up as gamekeepers, wielded a stuffed duck aloft and lampooned Kate Nash and Adele’s dedications to their Brit School alma mater by purporting to have also passed through its ranks.

As long as you kept reminding yourself that this was the Brits and the awards don’t actually correlate to actual achievements (Kanye West over Bruce Springsteen? Kate Nash over PJ Harvey? Please!) you could enjoy yourself. Ahead of the more deserving Feist, Kylie won Best International Female, despite one of the most underwhelming albums of her career.

Nevertheless, in a year of great pop singles you couldn’t begrudge a woman who — as her performance of the excellent Wow attested – keeps a dozen camp stormtroopers on speed dial. Similarly there wasn’t a soul in Earls Court who murmured dissent as Take That showed the humility that has made their return more welcome than certain other returning pop idols (would the Spice Girls have thought to thank their truck drivers?) If only for the miles they notched up on the Never Forget treadmill routine of their tour — not to mention the African voodoo routine on Relight My Fire — they were well worth Best Live Act.

As heartwarming scenes go, nothing came close to the sight of a ruddy-cheeked, fully engaged Amy Winehouse, singing Valerie alongside Best Male Artist winner Mark Ronson, and Love Is A Losing Game on her own.

We knew it would end with Paul McCartney singing in acknowledgement of his Outstanding Contribution award. Earlier Chris Moyles had joked that Macca might be performing with the Frog Chorus.

It would in truth have been preferable to his anaemic mandolin ditty Dance Tonight. Admittedly, a pyrotechnically abetted Live And Let Die was a vast improvement.

But years of over-familiarity have made Hey Jude something of a damp squib. And if he really wanted to take a sad song and make it better, he could have desisted from enlisting the help of the hordes of tanked-up industry execs.

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