Andrea Mullaney: In First Cut: The Other Michael Jackson, Sam Peter Jackson tells another tale of a talented man gone wrong, in a quite different way.

Its credits helpfully sum up the coy line it walks, as frustrated school basketball coach Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane) strides through town disrobing until jumping naked into a lake. But it's a safe striptease, shot with no full-frontal nudity – which is apt for a strangely passionless show about sex in which the never-seen main character is not so much Ray as Ray's apparently notable phallus. Yes, despite largely avoiding explicit scenes, this is not for delicate viewers as Ray's solution to his myriad problems ends up being to cash in on his one "marketable tool" as a male prostitute.

If it sounds like a male version of ITV2's Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, thankfully it's not quite as shallow and glossy; in fact the hour-long opening episode (subsequent ones are half-an-hour) shows just how crummy Ray's life had to become before he considered this unsavoury side job. A former charismatic high-school hero, he's now divorced, broke and has recently burnt down his house. "What happened to my life?" he laments. "I used to be a big deal, I used to be going somewhere."

Though billed as a comedy drama, Hung only provides a few dark laughs, chiefly because Ray is pretty much an unpleasant piece of work, though at least he admits it. His new scheme is pathetic, but as he says: "I'm a pathetic kind of guy."

Mind you, he's not so desperate that he – or the show – will consider him widening his client base to men; in fact the whole fantastical premise seems about as unrepresentative of prostitution as Belle du Jour's experience. But really it's just a gimmick to allow exploration of the familiar subject of so many of these American dramas: the hollowness of middle-class suburban life. In fact, the show covers much the same ground as creator Dmitri Lipkin's last quirky series, The Riches, with Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as crooked travellers masquerading as moneyed suburbanites. That intriguing if flawed show was sadly derailed by the last Hollywood writers' strike; hopefully Hung will, er, hang on a bit longer.

In First Cut: The Other Michael Jackson, Sam Peter Jackson tells another tale of a talented man gone wrong, in a quite different way. In 1978, Jackson recalls, his father wrote a classic disco hit, Blame It On The Boogie. His dad was Michael Jackson, but not that one; yet due to some murky dealings between his music publisher and Joe Jackson, father of the Jacksons, the American group ended up taking their version of the song into the Top Ten at the same time as Mick Jackson's original.

The media billed it as the "Battle Of The Boogie": a major label, international star act versus a plucky British underdog. Radio One and Melody Maker backed the Jacksons, who needed a hit to establish their post-Motown careers, while Capitol Radio and the NME went with Mick Jackson. But watching the two versions now, it's hard to believe there was any doubt. One had five boys with big Afros, gliding around in sparkly tank tops, while the still-pretty, not yet wacko Jacko squealed irrepressibly and literally seemed like he just couldn't control his feet. The other was a slow pub funk number by a middle-aged-looking Yorkshireman with a raggy beard, curly hair and Mr Byrite suit. He appeared on Top Of The Pops with his band, dressed in toffee-coloured leather jackets and oversized collars over white suits. You couldn't say their version was bad; it was definitely catchy, but given a choice ... there really was no choice.

Not only did the American Michael Jackson and his brothers get the glory, Mick Jackson didn't even get the money, due to legal issues that took years to sort out. He eventually got some sort of settlement and his website's list of his subsequent achievements bathetically includes "penning Austria's highest ever Eurovision Song Contest entry".

Still, watching him, his son Sam and brother and co-writer Dave all cheerfully jamming along to the song in Mick's comfortable farm in Germany, clearly close and happy, you wonder: who really did win the battle of the boogie in the end?

As the First Cut series exists to give new filmmakers a chance, it's perhaps mean to mock director Patrick Nation for a cheesy re-enactment, using two look-not-a-lot-alikes, of the time when Mick and Michael bumped into each other in a lift while staying at the same hotel. Yet while the facts of the story are interesting, the film doesn't add many insights. Mick Jackson was "frustrated" by having his song pinched, but got over it by focusing on "the more important things in life", we learn. Well, that's nice. At least he didn't blame it on the boogie.

Hung

Thursday, Channel 4, 10:45pm

First Cut: The Other Michael Jackson

Friday, Channel 4, 7:35pm