Messing at manners

With the Footsie finally showing some signs of recovery, it's time to ring the changes (I'm referring to my stockbrokers, Doris and Alan Changes) and get some financial backing for my latest food schemes. Investors will surely leap at the chance to buy shares in a product I'm marketing that makes vegetarian cuisine taste much, much better (it's called "meat"), not to mention my patent decanter that's guaranteed to keep your wine precisely at room temperature (it does nothing, but it doesn't need to, because every room is already at room temperature).

Best of all, I'm opening a chain of takeaways selling French Fries, our USP being that we're adding blue food colouring to the fat, so the potatoes emerge with an azure tint. And once the rumours about my Blue Chip Company start circulating around the City, I'm confident that investors will be queueing up eagerly to purchase shares.

With luck, I shall make as much out of the stock market as have other media types, such as the directors of Hat Trick Productions (who last week bagged £23 million), or the directors of Talkback, who also sold out for millions, several years ago.

Regrettably, Talkback's sell-out was not just financial, but artistic, too, and it's sad to see a company that produced some of the sharpest comedy of the 1980s and early 1990s now reduced to soft-headed mulch like The Dinner Party Inspectors (C4).

Amid claims that it "lifts the lid on the perpetual minefield of the modern dinner party", this moribund series sprang from the woefully misguided premise that Victorian notions of etiquette still have a place in contemporary society, and remain the benchmark to which all good hosts should aspire.

But they don't, and a good job, too, because dinner party etiquette was never taken seriously by the aristocracy, existing only to keep the nouveauxriches middle classes in check, and to hide from them the awful truth that they were really just animals at the trough.

The inspectors themselves are a cross between the Two Fat Ladies and Trinny and Susannah, with the vapid social commentator Victoria Mather partnered by the enormity that is Meredith Etherington-Smith (a woman who, if she ever bungeejumped, would probably bring the bridge down, too).

Self-appointed "arbitrators of all that is gourmet and socially correct", these two silly, posh women comment each week on the dinnertable performances of a group of aspiring oiks who have been unwise enough to let the cameras into their hovels, and scrutinise them as they attempt (and fail) to transform Suburbia into Belgravia.

Last night's lambs to the slaughter were Vicki and Tony Browne from Farnborough, a couple whose small talk turned out to be so small that it contravened new EU regulations, and so dull that it soon sent one of their fellow diners into a profound slumber. "One should never let one's guests fall asleep," declared Victoria and Meredith reprovingly, clean forgetting that we viewers were their guests, and that their enervating presentational style was already sending us all into a deep, yet satisfying coma.

I know for a fact that (off camera) the inspectors speak derisively of the nasty little Barratt homes they have to visit, and if that class hatred had only been allowed on the screen, then the result might have made for compelling television. But instead, they restricted themselves to commenting about purely subjective issues, such as whether or not smoking should be allowed at the table (between courses yes, during courses no, that's my rule), or mildly reproaching Vicki for the supposed faux pas of discussing her IVF treatment with her friends ("Do keep a lid on confessionals").