“Stay tuned for genius!” declared a sycophantic Davina McCall on Friday night.
“Absolute shite!” declared Dragon after sitting through half an hour of a new, agonisingly bad comedy show that’s “taken the US by storm’.

Ugly Betty is, primarily, for girls. It’s about fashion, after all, and it’s about beauty being only skin deep or some such sermonizing bollocks. It’s brim full of clichés such as the fantastic looking but amazingly shallow and bitchy staff, the ultra camp and condescending assistant, the stud-u-like male lead who comes across as a vain, self serving, nasty piece of work but is okay really but the main thing that’s lacking is, well, humour. Unless, that is, watching a fat, ugly girl committing “embarassing” social faux pas and doing lame pratfalls is your idea of high comedy.

And about this word “ugly”. Apparently “ugly” means wearing glasses, having braced teeth and wearing mismatched clothes. Oh, and being socially and physically inept. And fat. My biggest problem with the show (aside from the fact that it’s on TV at all) is that the title character is played by America Ferrara who could not be described as ugly at all. It undermines the point (if there is one) of the show by highlighting the wariness of the producers to employ someone who is anything other than good looking.

Needless to say, while I enjoy spending time with my beloved wife, there’s only so much of this sort of crap I can put up with. If there’s nothing better on next week then you may find me sticking splinters of bamboo under my fingernails and, quite possibly, into my eyes too.