A dog's dinner

I realise that many media flaneurs have mortgages and unusual habits to feed, but does that mean they have to say "yes" to every advertising man that propositions them? There's the Marxist Alexei Sayle voicing commercials for banks (for a further definition of hypocrisy, see p492 of the OED), Carol Vorderman promoting a surefire way to amass vast amounts of money (it's easy, you just front an advertising campaign for a lacklustre savings scheme), and Nana Mouskouri lookalike Jenny Eclair doing countless voice-overs in her shrill Stephen Hawking tones (acute accent yes, a cute presenter no).

Admittedly, Thora Hird has recently taken the stair lift to heaven, so we no longer have to endure her exhortations to buy a mechanical chair for "when stairs become a problem" (in my case, that's usually around midnight), but now that Antony Worrall Thompson has been released from the jungle, he'll doubtless be back promoting his proprietary food mixer, the one with his unlovely face slapped all over it.

Such egregious publicity-seeking suggests that he's trying to compensate for some childhood deficiency, and what a pity it is that his mother didn't let him lick the beaters now and again when he was a toddler. Preferably while the mixer was still switched on.

As for the septuagenarian Joan Collins, her finest professional hour came when she made those Cinzano ads with Leonard Rossiter, one modest peak in a career that is otherwise as flat as the Netherlands. The woman is famous solely for being famous, and for turning her every social contact into a photo opportunity, so she was therefore a natural choice last night to inaugurate BBC2's latest novelty chat show, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Although ostensibly there to choose six ideal guests for a fantasy dinner party, she managed to talk a great deal about herself, reminding us of her starring role in the US soap Dysentery, but neglecting to mention the numerous soft-porn flicks and long-forgotten B movies (does anyone out there remember Cosh Boy or Turn the Key Softly, or is it just me?) that constitute the bulk of her undistinguished oeuvre.

Indeed, so dismal is her track record that the only way she could honestly be said to have had a string of hits to her name would be if she changed her name by deed poll to Joan String-of-Hits Collins.

Not only was the show's central idea lifted from an After Eight mints commercial (the one in which James Dean and Marilyn Monroe share a table with Stephen Fry and Naomi Campbell), but the very concept seemed dated, because few people (other than media types) actually have dinner parties any more.

But, impervious to such trifles, presenter Anne Robinson asked Ms Collins to share with us her fantasy invitation list, and no cliche was left unexplored as they discussed just what each guest might bring to the table. Picasso would offer his "genius" and Marilyn her "vulnerability", while JFK would contribute his "charisma" and his legendary "three-a-night" sexual appetite.

How different from the dinner parties I used to attend in my younger days, where what the guests brought to the table was usually a warm bottle of Blue Nun and a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, along with an uncompromising ability to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

While these two working-class women talked as haughtily as ex-Roedean schoolgirls about Noel Coward and his "affected voice" my attention wandered towards the programme's myriad visual deficiencies. Trapezoid sets were already old hat on The Last Resort in the 1980s, but worse still were the tedious animated sequences of each guest slowly sitting down at the table, which brought the conversation grinding to a halt every few minutes, and were only kept in (I suspect) because they'd cost a lot of money.

Most of the guests were of fairly recent vintage, although Cleopatra had lived and died back in the first century BC (incidentally, how did she know it was the first century BC?), and as the show drew to its conclusion, a cruel irony struck me. For the purposes of light entertainment, six famous shades had been brought back from beyond the grave, not for any meaningful purpose, but simply to suffer the living death of having Joan Collins talk at them for an entire evening.

I'm no JFK, but if Collins invited me to dinner, I bet I'd end up sleeping with her (well, she talks so much about herself that my head would surely fall snoozing into the soup within minutes).