MUSIC festivals. Don’t you just love them? In a word?

No.

They feature, in ascending order of personal loathing, rain, mud, overflowing portable toilets, and Coldplay.

Endless ruddy Coldplay.

But if there’s one thing worse than suffering a festival in the flesh, it’s suffering a festival on television.

And just because Glastonbury is taking a year off, don’t think for one moment that this small inconvenience has deterred BBC3, which came to us live from the Hackney Weekend.

Two nights of mindless chat, from Fearne Cotton and Radio 1 DJ Greg James, with the occasional musical interlude including (take it away, Fearne): “The lovely Labrinth.” “The lovely Ed Sheeran.” “The lovely Rizzle Kicks.” “The lovely Nicki Minaj.”

For love, apparently, was in the air from this pair of goofs. “Jack White. I love that guy.” “Flo Rida. I just love him.” “Will.i.am. I love your coat.”

And this next exchange that exposed the overkill for the insincere fakery it is: Fearne: “Lana Del Rey is one of my absolute favourites.”

Greg: “Did you see her set earlier?”

“No.”

By Sunday night, Fearne’s “lovely”

Tourette’s had been replaced by an outbreak of “Unbelievables”

from Greg: “Rihanna is impossibly hot. It’s unbelievable.” “A masterclass from Jay-Z. Unbelievable.”

“The fireworks were going off just then. Unbelievable.”

Almost as unbelievable, in fact, as this piece of breaking news he delivered: “The Olympic park is in the background. In a month’s time, that will be used for the Olympics.”

He’s right, you know.

But for all Fearne and Greg’s time-filling uselessness, thank your lucky stars the whole shebang wasn’t anchored by roving reporter Gemma Cairney.

A jumping-bean caricature in an anorak, she was running around trying to spot Jay-Z, on Saturday evening, like Anneka Rice on Treasure Hunt, without much success until she stumbled upon a clue: “I still haven’t seen him but I reckon this might be his car. It’s quite shiny.”

And it’s just as well she didn’t catch up with him, because her line of questioning would have had to top this humdinger she had for rapper Professor Green: “Which number bus would you get to Homerton?”

Clearly one for the big interview exclusives is Gemma, which reached a nadir when she started asking the performers if they knew any Cockney rhyming slang, to which R singer Nicki Minaj replied before the watershed: “I couldn’t say a particular one. James Blunt.”

Just as well you didn’t say it, then, Nicki.

Gemma did, however, get a fuller response to her rhyming slang question from Nigerian artist D’Banj: “Top of the morning, top of the morning, top of the evening, in fact top of the day to you.

“I’m D’Banj, hope you have a confession. Liberty.”

I’ll take that as a no, then.

This week’s Couch Potato Spudulike awards:

* Jeremy Paxman giving hapless treasury minister Chloe Smith the full Paxman treatment on Tuesday’s watch-through-yourfingers Newsnight.

* The promising opening of BBC2 police corruption drama Line Of Duty.

* Alan Partridge’s long-awaited TV return, on Sky Atlantic, immediately followed by Armando Iannucci’s US version of The Thick Of It, Veep.

* Tim Wardle’s brilliant Channel 4 documentary Lifers.

* And this line, during an interview on This Morning with a woman named TJ who left her fiancé to pursue a porn-film career: “On the first day, it was just really hard.”

This week’s Couch Potato Spuduhate awards:

* Alistair McGowan explaining every joke on You Cannot Be Serious.

* BBC News channel’s Ben Brown claiming: “There had been a lot of negative press reports ahead of Euro 2012 of thuggish behaviour and racism,” only for an England supporter to point out to him that the chief culprit was BBC’s Panorama.

* Million Pound Drop’s lousy researchers offering the multiple choice answers to the question: “What was the most-watched TV show on Christmas Day 2011?” as Doctor Who, Absolutely Fabulous, the Queen’s message and EastEnders, when the actual answer was Downton Abbey.

* And a man called Adam Child, whose fiancée TJ left him to pursue a porn-film career, lying to This Morning’s Phillip Schofield that he’d never done porn himself, leaving the disgruntled host having to reveal the fact to viewers half an hour later: “I Googled him in the break and it took about 15 seconds to find him naked on a website.”

Which is roughly 15 seconds longer than This Morning’s researchers had spent finding out about him.