Live and yet shy: Ozzy and co take a back seat.

With the Osbournes playing a straight bat as hosts, the music did the real talking at this year's Brits

Talk about a potential recipe for disaster: tasking the loose-tongued Osbournes with holding together an awards ceremony on prime-time TV that for years was terrified of ever going out live again. But if anything, the family from hell proved to be too tame for this year's Brits.

A year ago much of the talk pre-show had been about the "bold" step of broadcasting the show live for the first time since the infamous Mick and Sam spectacle of 1989, but only 12 months on, concerns about being live already feel like very old news.

Even the Osbournes - not exactly the most obvious choices as presenters if you are looking to avoid the fiascos of past live Brit broadcasts - managed to avoid embarrassment, although their presence felt like a missed opportunity.

For such a rock `n' roll family, they surprisingly played a very straight bat as hosts, competently making all the necessary introductions and announcements, but on the whole failed to stamp their personalities on the event, which was presumably why they were booked in the first place.

With them taking something of a back seat, though, that meant at least the spotlight could rightly fall upon the music instead.

In a strange kind of way, the fact that the past year in music - which is, after all what the ceremony is meant to reflect - was not a vintage period actually worked in its favour.