[BACK] [MENU]

Do we care about Big Brother 2? Oh of course we care. We care a great deal about "Water Cooler TV" (the PR expression formerly known as "Talked About TV"), we care hugely that this bunch of exposure-hungry saps are our property for the next few weeks, and we look forward to seeing their nano-celebrity crashing and burning shortly after the final eviction. Most importantly, though, we care not one jot that it indicates a dumbing-down of the viewing-experience, that it is a blot on the copy-book of a channel we count on to provide output of an envelope-pushing nature. Nope, we don't care about that at all. But then, we're not French, are we?

See, over the channel, France is getting its first taste of reality TV in the shape of "Loft Story" (Big Brother on the top floor, effectively). And - l'horreur! - France is not best pleased. But then France is the country which famously refused to enter the Eurovision Song Contest one year, on the grounds that it lacked any kind of creative or artistic merit. The nation feels similarly about Loft Story, evidently, but rather than take the British approach (ie tut loudly and mentally compose a scathing letter to Points of View), our fearless protectors of les Beaux Arts have been staging raids on the building where the show is filmed, denouncing it as "voyeurism with no redeeming value" and getting facefulls of tear-gas in return for their egg- and tomato-chucking endeavours. Pah. Let them watch cack, we say.

Plenty of "voyeurism with no redeeming value" to enjoy in Sky One's "Single Girls" this month. The "This is what the programme seeks to investigate" disclaimer talks, however unconvincingly, about demystifying the dating-process in these troubled, Bridget Jonesian times. To which the media-savvy viewer replies "Yeah, whatever - now, how about you put four foxes into a central London penthouse with wall-to-wall cc-TV coverage, so we can watch them walking around in hip-skimming T-shirts, picking things up off the floor a lot?" We look forward to attaining a higher level of understanding vis-à-vis 'the Dating Experience' (cough) and welcome the promise of a mediterranean cruise as first prize, what with sun-oil and bikini's boasting all kinds of redeeming values of their own.

Single Girls does, admittedly, stop one step short of requiring its participants to bow their heads, look slowly up towards the camera and pull down their lower lip with their forefingers. Which is a criminal shame, obviously, although help is at hand in that respect from one of those marvellous Channel 5 acquisitions, the wilfully preposterous "Cleopatra 2525". Basic premise: a blonde stripper goes for a boob-job in 2001, gets cryogenically frozen by mistake, and wakes up in the 26th Century, a place where the surface of the Earth is ruled by "Baileys" (quite how a sugary cream liqueur evolved into big, fuck-off mercury-hulled killing machines is never fully explained). This leaves the humans to eke out an underground existence, in a world where all articles of clothing have been purloined from a Missy Elliot video-shoot and where any marauding intruder can be repelled simply by thrusting an ultra-firm cleavage in his or her direction. It's Buck Rogers in The 25th Century, basically. Only with hooters.

The big acquisition this month, obviously, is "Friends". Arriving on Channel 4, the seventh season is a mixed bag (much like the preceding series, there are more dips in quality than you've come to associate with the production), although in terms of stunt-casting, this one has every base covered. Susan Sarandon kicks things off nicely, in that regard, but the real show-stoppers are Winona Ryder indulging in some girl-on-girl with Jennifer Aniston, and Kathleen Turner playing Chandler's dad. Yes, you read that right.

We should, in fairness, pander to our highly-valued French readership and offer up something good, true and worthy, something with all its artistic credential intact. Naturally we turn to the BBC for that kind of thing - finest broadcasting company in the world, an ambassadorial envoy that carries a guarantee of quality before it all over the planet, you know the script... Ah yes, but you see, someone forgot to tell its digital branch, BBC Choice, about all that… And its with beaucoup de glee, then, that we welcome two of their offerings this month: Sex, Warts N All is - there being no room for anything else on the schedules these days - a reality fly-on-waller. Set in a Glaswegian STD Clinic. Expect many pixellated red faces and "some fairly horrific shots of strange-looking genitals".

And if that's not dragging the good BBC name through enough smut, then prepare to embrace "Nude TV" from the same channel. A series of ten documentary shorts, each focusing on a much-loved human bodypart (or, as an insider told us, "a damn good opportunity for perving"), it boasts such episode titles as "nipples", "bums" and "balls", along with all those juicy factoids that can only make your party-chat repertoire that much the richer. We'll leave you to work out which episode offers us the life-affirming news that sixty per cent of Brazilians enjoy regular anal sex.