The week before Christmas is always what you might call a yawning chasm, with schedulers correctly assuming that everybody will be out shopping or being sick on the train so what's the point of wasting perfectly good programmes that will do nicely on Boxing Day evening with a white sauce?

Of course, there wasn't literally nothing on. The biggest slow-burner of the season went bang on Sunday night courtesy of The X Factor final, with young dreamers Olly and Joe still holding to the idea that you can have anything you want just by wanting it, which is a novelty to those of us who remember when "I want never gets" was the nation's favourite article of faith. But which of the boys wanted it most? That was a question trumped only by how ITV was going to fill two hours while the rest of us spent millions on phone calls.

Time-wasting was soon under way, starting with the grand opera of getting the judges down the stairs amid the yammering graphics and blazing lights – Dannii as Eva Peron and lovely Cheryl trailing a black wedding dress behind her; the pair of them escorted by Simon, face as stiff as his chimney-brush hair, and bowtied Louis, grinning like the office joker at a building society dinner. That was five minutes gone, but now the stage was alive with the ghosts of rejected candidates invited back to do a number with the boys, cavorting shamelessly and wearing the desperate rictuses of people still hoping to cheat death. Dermot O'Leary, swivelling on his heel like a man on castors, introduced "the story of last night", a blitzkrieg of clips from Saturday's show accompanied by the usual disaster movie music and lasers and anti-aircraft fire and surging Wagnerian choruses, ending with an ad break for Argos and Pizza Hut. By the time beefy Essex boy Olly Murs finally came on for an alarming tight-trousered "Twist and Shout" routine with a cast of thousands and backing tapes, Simon had almost grown a beard.

Olly and 18-year-old Joe McElderry, from South Shields (the eventual winner, for those who don't care enough to already know) managed 10 minutes of competitive crooning in between guest stars with festive CDs to publicise and the competition to win a holiday in LA and endless saccharine biogs and video diaries and family snaps and barking live hysteria from Colchester and the north-east, and interviews with proud mums, dads, aunts and uncles, previous winners and old teachers and postmen and dancing bears. Cheryl emoted for geordies the world over, while Simon – alternating between his fake thoughtful look and his fake yikes! look – developed a speech impediment that rendered him unable to start sentences without the words "Do you know what?"

It was a bit more sedate over on the other side, where Ryan Giggs was busy winning The BBC Sports Personality of the Year – though presumably not for his personality, which probably preferred its football to do the talking. Even so, he was up against strong opponents, four of whom even I'd heard of ( including Beth Twaddle, or Tweddle as it turned out). Gary Lineker struggled with an echoing microphone while Sue Barker tried to enthuse the audience (who had come dressed for a christening) on the subject of women's cricket. It wasn't compelling but at least the BBC had paid for a proper orchestra.

I didn't really expect How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lolita? to answer its own question, but Stephen Smith's gentle fathoming of Nabokov's classic about the seduction of a pubescent girl by a middle-aged predator closed in on it. With Nabokov, the hoary issue of whether great art can be squared with doubtful morals is complicated by the literary world's torn regard for the genius behind it. How much were the urges of Humbert Humbert – a character as enduring in the mind as any in fiction – a sublimation of the author's own? And if Nabokov was a perv in hiding, what did that make us, seduced by this suave creation, sent out with a case to plead and the guile to do it?

The programme was edged with extracts from Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film of the book starring James Mason and an old BBC documentary showing Nabokov up a mountain with a butterfly net and browsing in a European newsagent's. He didn't spend much time defending Lolita. He wrote all his books for the fun of it, he said. Did he protest too little? Smith (bravely opting to pronounce Nabokov with an "oh!" in the middle) set out on the great man's trail – to Switzerland, to Russia, where Nabokov was born to an aristocratic family, to his adoptive New York and to Cambridge, where he played in goal for the university football team. First stop, though, was a grand lakeside hotel in Montreux (or Montreaux, as Smith interestingly called it) where Nabokov lived with his wife, Vera, for 15 years. Here, Toni the barman remembered the writer as a "happy, happy man", revealing that Vera did most of the work while her husband – a serious lepidopterist – went off to catch butterflies. Did he leave good tips? asked Smith. "No tips!" insisted Toni.

Smith wandered around, inhaling the grandeur. "What kind of person lives in a hotel?" he wondered. Perhaps the kind who grew up surrounded by flunkeys, I wondered back. Off he went, looking for answers, to the Nabokovs' old summer estate near St Petersburg, which the young Vladimir inherited from his uncle, along with the equivalent of $2m. It was here that the 15-year-old Nabokov fell madly in love with a local girl his own age. Five minutes later (in TV years), the Bolsheviks were on the streets, the family were fleeing to Berlin and Nabokov never saw the girl or his country again. Was it this multiple trauma, Smith asked, that fixed Nabokov – "like a figure in the lava of Pompeii" – with an obsession that invested love and evanescent beauty with a sense of loss?

Humbert, in Lolita, had been scarred, too, with the loss of a childhood love, and the fixation with young girls surfaced in much of Nabokov's other fiction. "Lolita was always going to happen," said Martin Amis, a fervent but worried admirer of Nabokov. "He liked the idea of it too much."

In one of the most telling parts of this engaging film, Smith discovered the clapboard house Nabokov lived in during the 40s, when he taught at Cornell University in upstate New York. There in the back garden he found the incinerator – a barbecue now – where Vera had pulled the Lolita manuscript from the flames after her husband had tried to destroy it. Perhaps writing it wasn't that much fun after all.

Jamie Oliver was all over the ads, trying to get us to buy Sainsbury's mince pies, but then turned up on Jamie's Family Christmas airily suggesting we bugger about making our own strudel! I did like the look of his gravy, though, which he made with a baby wailing in his ear. "Don't bother peeling the veg," he said, unnecessarily.

Glee is the word

Glee, E4's latest US comedy import, doesn't start until the new year but they ran the pilot last week. Is it for Mamma Mia! fans? High School Musical addicts? The more you try to describe Glee, the worse it sounds. There's the teacher with something to prove and his showbiz choir of losers, so cheese lovers will be happy. But it's not Dead Poets Society schmaltz, and it's smarter than School of Rock; camp but not Ugly Betty camp, and keen on life's hard lessons, though no worse than Scrubs. Idealists versus cynics, nerds versus meatheads – it's all here, nicely drawn, with sharp wit amid the goofery and hoofery. See the poor teacher and his missus at home completing an American Gothic jigsaw. My God, I feel a song coming on...