Charlie Courtauld: A schoolboy error if ever there was one

Every so often in television land, a format comes up which is so simple, so perfect, so awe-inspiringly watchable that everyone claims to have thought of it first. Or else they are working on a pilot based on it. A few years ago the BBC's Rock'n'Roll Years was the one. Then it was Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, or Changing Rooms, then Big Brother. The programme of the moment is Faking It, a Channel 4 offering in which ordinary punters are given a month of training before trying to blag their way into being a professional chef, DJ, bouncer or whatever. They then have the chance to fool the experts.

It's a fantastic idea. It often came off brilliantly, especially in the case of the chef and the DJ. But, as with all the best formats, it has a limited shelf life, suffering from the law of diminishing re-runs. And that's where the mysterious development people come in. Take a familiar, successful format and give it a neat twist. Hey presto: a new programme. So we get Changing Rooms – with gardens. Or Big Brother meets Who Wants To Be A Millionaire – in the south Pacific! You get the idea.

Now Channel 4 has been caught out in its desperate efforts to replicate the Faking It magic. A 30-year-old producer called Sheridan Simove – that's his real name not the faked version – managed to pass himself off as a 17-year-old to enrol as a pupil and gain access to a school. When his cover was blown, the school went ballistic and the plug was pulled on the production. Quite right too, in my opinion. The head teacher suggests that the school's trust has been abused and is threatening to sue Channel 4.

In taking this course of action, the producer blundered across that fine line between being clever and being stupid. If he had had the nous, or the guts, to blag his way past the hurried and commission-based world of teacher recruitment agencies to pass himself off, without qualifications, as a teacher rather than as a pupil, then I would wholly applaud his actions – so long as the deception was short-lived. To have exposed this throughput-based and money-driven world would have been a valuable public service, as the Amy Gehring episode taught us. But to Fake It as a pupil seems to me to be wholly pointless. "We believe it had a valid purpose: to try and capture the sense of what it would be like to go back to school for the second time around," whined Channel 4. Tosh. It is the entertainment commissioners at Channel 4 who need to learn a thing or two.

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Partly as a result of my multiple sclerosis and partly because of an operation my three-year old daughter needed, I've spent a lot of time in hospitals recently. They're pretty grim places generally, from the off-milk, cream paint on the walls to the strip lights suspended from those holes-like-Swiss-cheese ceiling tiles. It's all very 1940s, even down to the round pin-plugs halfway up the walls everywhere, next to those public information posters telling us to pack in the fags. But next time you're in, cast your eyes down. Look at the floor. Most hospitals lay down that skidmark-on-lino stuff. You know, the green or grey speckly plastic with a black smudge down it. But lino has a drawback, as I found out when I spilt a jug of water on the floor just before Martha's operation. It's slippery. After her slide, tumble and the ensuing banged head, we nearly had the operation cancelled.

So what's the alternative? Step forward those private-finance-initiative geniuses who – for a mere £210m – have built the new Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. Their solution? Carpet. Lovely soft carpet. No chance of skidding on that. Unfortunately, there's not much chance of pushing a patient-laden trolley on it, either. Unless you're Geoff Capes, of course.

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Tonight an array of Hollywood's finest will demonstrate their finest acting skills as they pretend – in close-up – to be delighted to see rivals scoop the golden statuettes. Close-up disappointment is the joy of Oscar night, just as it was during Celebrity Big Brother. That split second of "How could the bastards do this to me?" before the agent-demanded "I'm so happy for my dear friend" face catches up. This year's ceremony has already been marked by disinformation, smears, anti-smoking protests, and racial and gender political shenanigans. That should make the losing easier for the poor celebs to bear.