Sunday night at the Baftas, and Jonathan Ross opens with a complaint that Kate Winslet's two nominated films would give a man with his speech impediment some difficulty – The Reader and Revolutionary Road.

A piece of cake if you ask me. If he wanted a real challenge, he should have been reading the sports report on the BBC News channel an hour earlier: "A surpwise wesult in wugby league where Wakefield Wildcats beat Wigan Wawwiors."

He'd have been more hard-pwessed with that one.

Instead, at that very moment, he was on the red carpet chatting to the world's most excitable woman, BBC3 Baftas build-up host Claudia Winkleman who exclaimed: "It is properly exciting. It's a very long red carpet." She spent the next 35 minutes asking Hollywood A-listers like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt questions suggested by primary school children so she didn't "bore" them with the usual dross asked.

To James Bond actor Daniel Craig: "What pets have you got?" To Goldie Hawn: "Why is there life on Earth?" And, after telling Penelope Cruz that the actress looked so beautiful she wanted to smell her hair, our hapless interviewer inadvertently regressed her to some deeply buried childhood trauma by asking: "What would you rather be, an antelope or a celebrity?"

Cruz informed her that bullies had called her Antelope instead of Penelope as a youngster, and hurried away with a look that said: "Please woman, for the love of God, leave me alone. And no, you can't smell my hair."

It wasn't long before the kids' questions/psychological torture dried up and Winkleman started boring the stars with the usual dross, asking everyone in sight if they were excited to be there, before telling Winslet, pictured: "I can't believe I'm actually standing in front of you. I want to lick your shoulder." So, not before time, to the ceremony itself. The coverage switched from BBC3 to BBC2, then BBC1. I was expecting to find it on BBC Blast Off after that.

It was so confusing that even the on-screen caption at the end of the red carpet show got the channels mixed up.

Thankfully, Wossy was there to restore order. Although not a patch on former Baftas host Stephen Fry, he presented the event with the kind of confident, humorous aplomb completely lacking at December's British Comedy Awards, fronted disastrously by his BBC ban stand-in Angus Deayton.

Unfortunately, rigor mortis seemed to have set in among the assembled stars from Winkleman's inane questions, and his jokes fell so flat that he resorted to a quip about Mickey Rourke having to serve a three-month suspension for swearing during his acceptance speech.

J ust three moments elevated the night from mediocrity – Mick Jagger's brilliant ad-libbing, the shock winner of the Carl Foreman Award for Most Promising Newcomer turning out to be a director named Steve McQueen, who'd not only apparently come back from the dead but is now a burly 6ft 4in, kilt-wearing black man.

And the announcement that, having won the Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema gong, Pinewood and Shepperton Studios were unable to be there in person to accept it.

As for next year's winner in the Baftas inanimate object category, my money's on Claudia Winkleman.