Most damningly Desperate Scousewives suggested that the cast of Jersey Shore might deserve their ill-gotten fortunes, as, despite being awful, useless human beings, they do at least understand how to perform for the cameras. So terrible were they that they in fact made Tyrone and Salina from last week's Hot Like Us look like witty, debonair conversationalists, or the cast of Made in Chelsea look talented, or The Only Way is Essex bunch look like interesting people you'd want to spend time with. Other than 'journalist' Elissa, who was the only one capable of pulling off a recognisable emotion, the cast were uniformly terrible. Even worse was her nemesis, self-proclaimed 'Britain's bitchiest blogger' Jaiden, whose outpourings I unfortunately stumbled across when trying to find evidence that these were in fact real people (I'm still not wholly convinced – but then, judging how lazy the show itself was, I doubt the programme makers would have bothered to create online personas for its 'stars') his 'blog' just being reams of fawning, poorly written, mind-numbingly tedious content that read like postings on the Digital Spy user forums (see Jaiden, that's how you do bitchy blogging). Instead of that, we were presented with the likes of on-off couple Joe and Layla and 'only famous in Liverpool' Amanda, who, much like the cast of Hot Like Us, felt compelled to tell us how hard her life as a model is, what with all the work she's had to do for free (you should try being an aspiring pop-culture writer in this day and age luv). To be honest, calling the cast of Desperate Scousewives 'characters' seems like giving the programme more credit than its due, as it would imply that they had actually been instilled with any sense of personality (the appeal of 'structured reality' for programme-makers seems pretty clear – there's no need to put the effort into creating believable characters as you would in a drama, nor do you have to worry about the documentarian's concerns of catching the right moment, or of the ethics of what you're filming, as you can just manipulate and fake your way through the whole thing). And just in case you didn't get the message, throughout the episode the characters went on and on about “The Style Awards”, which the producers assured us was in fact 'a real thing that people care about' by filming Ricky Tomlinson from The Royle Family sitting at a table for a couple of seconds. Things were off to a loser from the start with the opening narration by plucky, yet spectacularly dim Jodie (on being introduced to a couple of male hairdressers who were camp even by gay male hairdresser standards, she felt the need to ask them “Are you brothers?”), desperately trying to convince us just how stylish everything and everyone in Liverpool is. The latest in this most irritating of televisual sub-genres is Desperate Scousewives (Monday, E4) and somehow, the least infuriating thing about is that the producers clearly thought of the title before the rest of the show, and then didn't even bother to make the programme fit it (other than the cast being Scouse, and they were quite possibly desperate for agreeing to appear in the show in the first place I suppose). But, with each new 'structured reality' show that makes its way onto our screens, the more I start to think that they may have a point. People who, whenever the subject of TV programmes comes up, feel the need to proudly declare “I don't even own a television” are the worst kind of people (and they've managed to make The Guardian's comments section largely unreadable).
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