Last Week Tonight review – John Oliver takes on Brexit with his satirical javelin

If football isn’t your thing, the electronic programme guide is a bare cupboard until 10 July. Watching broadcast television in the gaps between Euro 2016 matches is an exercise in barrel-scraping that has sent many of us into box-set hibernation. But if there’s a solitary scrap of goodness to be found in the schedules, I will seek it out in preference, because I still crave the shared viewing experience.

So, thank heavens for HBO’s Last Week Tonight (Sky Atlantic), John Oliver’s satirical javelin, thrust deep into the flank of the political animal, which we get a day after the US. Again and again, he nails the absurdities of a complex situation like no one else. As an Englishman abroad, he turns his attention to our EU referendum in a superbly patient but furious 15-minute rundown of the arguments on both sides.

He says “Brexit” sounds like “a shitty granola bar you’d buy at the airport”, and I’m inclined to agree. Has anyone actually taken responsibility for this irksome portmanteau tosh? It started with celebrity couples (Brangelina and so on) and now seems to be automatically applied to almost anything making the news. Could we have a vote to stop it?

Why, he says, should Americans concern themselves with the collective tantrum of a few middle-Englanders thousands of miles away? As long as the “crooked-toothed scone goblins keep shooting out royal babies and episodes of Doctor Who”, what has it got to do with the US? His take on the whole sorry mess is unique in its apparent understanding of both sides. He doesn’t sympathise with those seeking to raise the drawbridge against an imagined swarm of foreign cut-throats and scroungers. But he gets the reflexive British loathing of European sensibilities.

While he describes Boris Johnson as having “both the look and economic insight of Bamm-Bamm from The Flintstones”, he admits to jerking his own knee in response to some EU edicts. All the same, the jump from laughing at petty regulations to severing all connections is substantial. And he says, with genuine poignancy: “It is hard for me to overstate to you, just how poisonous things have become in England,” when referring to last week’s horrific events in Birstall. It’s difficult for a satirical show to encompass the whole ungainly mess in such a short time, but Oliver never sidesteps the gravitas.

In a final flourish, a barber-shop quintet in union jack waistcoats sing “Fuck the European Union”, a rousing Ode to Joy with new lyrics in which we British own our hatred of the EU while admitting we still need to be a part of it. When do we get a UK satire show with such teeth?

While my own anti-EU feelings continue towards the football, I spent a rewarding hour gazing at Made in Chelsea (E4). This series (its four billionth) is reaching its glossy-haired, narrow-hipped climax and, as with every series, I find myself unwilling to look away. It’s on a list with Don’t Tell the Bride and First Dates as the shows I am always in the mood for. Each week, a group of young, silken thoroughbred foals negotiate the heavy going of friendships, parties, outfits and gossip, often attempting the Becher’s Brook of first love, only to fall and break their hearts in the attempt. Like every other season, this one has featured real girls and boys (none of them has the maturity to be called women and men) doing very little apart from feeling. Because they don’t have the worries of a regular human – job security, making rent, saving up for anything – the show is entirely focused on what is going on in their hearts.

It’s feelings porn. We zoom in on a heartbroken Binky (it’s a nickname) as she crumples during a heart-to-heart with lantern-jawed JP. She loves him, but he won’t take her back after a minor infidelity. It has all the tropes of a pop video (music swelling as she bursts into tears), but her feelings are undoubtedly real.

Binky is the entry-level drug for the Made in Chelsea viewer. You won’t care what happens to the rest of them, but you will care about Binky. It’s her I’m hooked on: an open-hearted people-pleaser who, despite having her own clothing line, is still so easily swayed by others she hardly knows what to order for brunch. And that’s pretty much all she does: eats brunch, has feelings.

Banal scenes of hope and disappointment play out against a backdrop of Fisher Price adult life. But they’re clopping around in grownup shoes, pretending at life, which, at the moment, seems preferable to living in actual reality.