Lazy, crude and callous TV

Whenever somebody tells me that they like watching some soap or other "because it's so true to life", I always reach for my Ronco Bump Feeler.

True to life? Then why does nobody ever pick their own nose while stuck in a traffic jam, walk around naked in their own house, break wind loudly then proudly sniff the air, or discuss other soaps they've seen on the telly?

Most of the customers in the Queen Vic move their lips yet emit no sound, like robots in Westworld, and I don't recall anyone in the Rover's Return ever requesting a pound for the Johnny Durex machine, or uttering a racist remark, or even a casual f-word (the sort of events that happen in most city pubs on any given night).

What's more, whenever a dozen soap characters are gathered together in one place, no two of them ever have the same Christian name, and no youths ever pass drugs to each other underneath the table, as they do in every other pub in the land (a curious practice, incidentally, because if they simply passed the stuff over the table instead, nobody would even notice).

Talk of "reality comedy" is just as meaningless, yet that's what My Little Friends (E4) is, according to the portentous press release that accompanies the series, an anonymously penned document whose author should, by rights, be called Hugh Briss.

According to Mr Briss, the show "takes the comic traditions of Trigger Happy TV and Ali G to the next level" because it is "presented by a cast of children", and, better still, "it exploits people's perceptions of children in the funniest way imaginable."

But while Dom Joly and Sacha Baron Cohen are highly intelligent presenters who have mastered the art of pretending to be slightly dumber than the people they're spoofing (while actually running rings around them), the kids who front this show have no concept of how to play the cat-and-mouse game, so no comedy is generated by their interaction with the public.

And as for claims of "reality," the shoddy nature of the editing shone through from beginning to end of last night's programme, which contained more dodgy cuts than the entire Out-Patients Department at the Mogadishu clitoridectomy clinic.

Having heard Bob Geldof recently lambasting the publishers of teen magazines for encouraging children to talk to adults about advanced sexual practices, I wonder how he feels about Planet 24 (the company he used to own) producing an entire series that's predicated on that very concept.

In almost every scene last night, the child presenters (some as young as 12) had been instructed by their adult writerproducers to ask passers-by intimate questions about sex, or to spell out four-letter words, in what was a crude attempt to generate embarrassment and discomfort. "What is fisting? Is it gay boxing?" one girl asked agony aunt Denise Robertson, while another subjected two affable pensioners to continual lowgrade sexual humiliation.