No results from the big match

Because television overwhelmingly attracts people so unimaginative that, if they took LSD, they would hallucinate

Over the years, I have amused myself by submitting numerous fake proposals to gullible production companies, such as Candied Camera, where I described "a honey-encrusted lens that will take pictures of birds pecking away at the angelica tripod" (the rejection letter expressed interest, but noted that "we already have several nature programmes in development").

Then there was Alphabetti Spaghetti, a food-programme-cum-game-show where a bulimic presenter would vomit letter-pasta randomly onto the carpet until a well-known phrase or saying appeared ("not suitable for a daytime audience" I was informed), but I still have hopes for two pet shows: Animal Hospice (where Uncle Rolf visits cute but terminally ill kittens and puppies), and The Sheepdog Trials, where Border collies are put before a kangaroo court, found guilty, and executed by firing squad ("our animation department may well be interested," I've been told).

Absurd they may be, but such formats are no more ludicrous than most of the programmes developed by "media genius" Chris Evans, whose pre-eminent talent is surely his ability to hypnotise commissioning editors into forgetting the Niagara of TV disasters he's made and into giving him maximum budgets for minimum ratings. For example, his Live with...Chris Moyles is merely an appallingly cheap copy of TFI Friday (so cheap that it ought to be renamed MFI Friday), as was all too evident from an archive clip that appeared in Dermot's Sporting Buddies last night.

To be fair, even Evans wouldn't construct anything quite as flimsy as this BBC Choice series "in which Dermot O'Leary accompanies a celebrity to a sporting event of their choice," yet that didn't stop the BBC commissioning it, and paying enough for the entire production team to sod off to America to visit the famous East Coast city of Twice. Never heard of it? Well, it used to be known as New York but, according to a song I heard recently, it's so good they named it Twice. Probably something to do with the Twin Towers.

The pretext for the visit was a meeting with Huey Morgan (of the Fun Lovin' Criminals), who had agreed to "chill out" with O'Leary prior to attending a basketball game at Madison Square Gardens.

The sight of a bloated Telly Savalas lookalike who clearly believes that his Beastie-Boys-meets-Ali-G routine is "cool" was sad enough, but sadder still was the spectacle of a former Radio Essex DJ and his parochial British film crew lapping it up, like a group of wet-behindtheears first years being led astray by a naughty fourth former.

The promised "insight into Huey's sporting world" consisted mostly of finger-cracking and boyakasha-ing, talking about smoking dope in the car (but not actually doing it, because this was the BBC), dissing the New York Knicks, and boasting about the alleged size of Mr Morgan's penis. Not that I was either impressed or intimidated by that, because I'll have you know that I myself measure a full two inches. And I'm measuring upwards from ground zero.

After confessing to his early criminal career, and showing us footage of his equally criminal career on the stage, Huey took O'Leary to some of his "favourite Manhattan haunts" (most of which he clearly hadn't visited in years). Thus it was that we saw the outside of the building that has replaced the house where he was born, a dumpster on the East River not dissimilar to the one behind which he lost his virginity, and his tailor's shop on East 7th Street (which was closed, so we had to peer at the unremarkable merchandise within through a metal grille).

Having sampled a pizza made with "a unique sauce" (Huey had the sauce not even to tell us what was so unique about it), the pair eventually ended up at a basketball game, where the Knicks scored a rare victory, while Huey admitted to owning shares in a garbage-collecting company. Well, he's composed and performed garbage for years, and had just expected us to watch garbage too, so completing the circle by trucking garbage away was clearly the least he could do.

Lazily recorded on cheap DV cameras (I know because the crew couldn't even keep their shop window reflections out of shot), this was a typically unimaginative and wide-eyed "Brits in New York" programme. The questioning was shallow ("has New York changed since you were a kid?" being typical), and the directing was clichè-ridden throughout (full of predictable angled shots of skyscrapers and "Walk Don't Walk" traffic signs), and the only half-decent conversation revolved around Huey's reminiscences of John Gotti, "the New York version of the Kray Twins ... though not as overtly violent".