Congratulations to Joe Calzaghe who, by defeating Bernard Hopkins in Las Vegas early on Sunday morning, extended his professional record to 45 victories and one defeat, the defeat coming just a handful of hours earlier in ITV's All Star Mr & Mrs.

Shame. Just a little more consistency in the “His ‘n' Hers” round and the Welshman might have achieved a rare televised double. As it was, the boxer was left ruing a couple of tiny slips that enabled William Roache, the Coronation Street actor, and his wife, Sarah, to get off the ropes and take the title on a split decision.

Calzaghe, understandably, looked gutted - or maybe, to be more accurate, slightly queasy. Actually, thinking about it, he looked like that all the way through the show. But the show can do that to a person, even someone with Calzaghe's cast-iron constitution and appetite for a scrap.

It looks easy enough from the outside. But when your partner is clamped under headphones and a blindfold in the soundproof shower cubicle, and Fern Britton starts coming at you with those short, jabbing questions, it must feel like the loneliest place on earth.

Still, Calzaghe can perhaps consider himself fortunate even to be allowed to compete in this division. In past years, he would have been automatically ineligible on a technicality - namely, that he and his partner, Jo-Emma Larvin, are (whisper this) not married and therefore not, if we're going to be precise about it, Mr & Mrs at all.

Neither, now we think about it, were the night's third couple, Lembit Opik and Gabriela Irimia, of the Cheeky Girls. One doesn't wish to sound out of step with the times, yet one hears the claim of the traditionalists who insist that Mr & Mrs was a far tougher sport before they let any old pairing in.

But let's not get into an argument about declining standards here. You could equally well maintain that Joe and Jo-Emma qualified for a place on their own intimate merits, and that if you were to change the show's title to Mr & Ms, you would lose some of the zing. Ditto if you switched it to All Star Civil Partnership or Unfathomable Novelty Pop Singer/Liberal MP Collision.

Moreover, which boxing fan wouldn't have wanted to hear how, in the obligatory period of abstinence before a bout, that Calzaghe misses beer more than dessert and “how's your father” - and, what is more, to have it independently demonstrated, immediately afterwards, that Jo-Emma knows this to be true? Although, as Calzaghe explained that he doesn't really abstain from “how's your father” anyway, the question was helpfully simplified in their case.

We also learnt of Joe and Jo-Emma together, that “they enjoy long country walks and snuggling up in bed with a puzzle book”. Good job none of this was (one assumes) being pumped across the Atlantic and into Hopkins's dressing-room. It might have been all the incentive he needed. Remember the days when Calzaghe didn't do this kind of thing - when he was content to be sport's best-kept secret? They were good days.

Calzaghe wasn't the only boxer risking his career record in a light-entertainment setting last weekend. On ITV's new Beat The Star, a policeman called Dan Ivey was offered £50,000 if he could come out the better from seven challenges against a famous opponent. The bad news for Copper Dan was that the star in question was Amir Khan. The good news was that none of the challenges was boxing.

You know, people run down the morality of television all the time, but the idea of Vernon Kay smilingly offering a member of the public a briefcase full of cash to get beaten up by a professional fighter is still beyond it, so things can't be all that bad, can they?

Nevertheless, the underpowered, slightly village-fête nature of some of the challenges meant that one found oneself, for a short but somehow telling period of this show, watching a policeman in a tracksuit knock nails into a block of wood. Similarly, when Khan fought his way to Olympic silver in 2004, he can barely have imagined that a slot on prime-time television would eventually open in which he would engage in competitive cow-milking against a member of the Plymouth drug enforcement unit.

Interesting times.

Incidentally, Khan, though he narrowly lost in the cow-milking, triumphed overall. But by then our attention had been almost completely distracted by the sight of Dermot Gallagher in the role of tournament official. The former elite-list football referee thus sets out in the distinguished footsteps of Arthur Ellis, who, having refereed an FA Cup Final, went on to still greater glory as the final arbiter on It's A Knockout.

Well, good luck with that, Dermot, although we have the sneaking suspicion that, as long-surviving game-show formats go, It's A Knockout may just have the edge.