You're not really supposed to like Trinny and Susannah on What Not to Wear (BBC2), are you? You're meant to think they are snide, judgmental, pretty vacant posh girls, whose foray into fashion is but a sideline, and who delight in picking on ordinary people for their fondness of polo necks. Even though they manage to be nice and self-deprecating ("I've got massive breasts," snorts Trinny; "I've got thick calves," sighs Susannah) while they're being nasty to their makeover victim ("You looked like a dog before we met you - ie your whole life - but that suit we've made you wear is smashing"), it's the nasty that's supposed to stick in your mind. After all, What Not To Wear is a spoof makeover show, isn't it. Isn't it?
Whatever - and against my better judgement - I don't care. I love them, toffee-nosed Telegraph types or no. Come and fix my life, Trinny and Susannah, I implored the telly last night. Bring your fash mag fascism and come fillet my wardrobe: make me a finer, more attractive, shinier person. Make me wear flattering colours, becoming necklines and flat-fronted trousers. Warn me of the dangers of chunky knits on big breasts and pleats on podgy tummies. Get me to a hairdresser. I know I will be a better person when you have worked your magic on me.
Or will I just have spent £2,000 on clothes and been humiliated on national television? Hmmm.
Thanks to the countless Making of... articles, programmes and web pages, Walking With Beasts (BBC1) has lost its allure. Instead of marvelling at the size of the indricothere (the size of eight rhinos!), or noting the similarities between the entelodont (aggressive, not very bonny, two metres tall, brain the size of an orange) and Vinnie Jones, I now spend the whole time thinking "That's obviously a puppet" or "What a neat bit of CGI." It's like watching The Muppets Take Jurassic Park. It's all very well giving "added value" to viewers with these glimpses behind the scenes but when the lasting image you have of the series is of a bloke operating a sabre-toothed tiger puppet against a blue screen, you know the magic's gone and it's all been ruined. Especially when the sabre-tooths look like oversized mittens with fangs.
It's a shame 25 million years separate us from the indricothere because it means there is no chance of a Kenyon Confronts (BBC1) in which the irritatingly intrepid reporter accosts the Right Big Mammal over its eating habits only for the creature to stamp on his scrawny body until all that's left of Kenyon is bloody pulp and a mangled secret camera. I would pay money to see that. As it is, I am paying for him to track down people who have faked either their own or someone's else's death so as to defraud insurance companies. This meant nipping off to Greece, getting someone from the BBC bureau in Damascus to hunt down some bloke's family to see how upset they are at his wife's "death" (as if they don't have enough to do) and calling in the country's leading expert in facial mapping (ditto). It also meant Kenyon adopting that faux artless "surprise" upon discovering Something Was Amiss. Oh, and he slipped into some ill-advised shorts. Eugh.
After exposing Mr Abdallah - and, indeed, his wife - for faking his wife's death, and finding a deceased St Albans restaurateur alive and well in Athens, Kenyon was so chuffed with himself that he faked his own demise in Haiti. He even lay in a coffin pretending to be dead for the funeral video. (How the congregation resisted the urge to nail the coffin shut and bury it is beyond me.) Hurray!
Or not. Call me old-fashioned but snake-in-the-grass multinational insurance companies who short-change their customers as a matter of course (ask the Consumer Association) don't really strike me as poor defenceless little victims that SuperKenyon needs to defend. With my licence fee. Rather than being a bad thing, I say that faking your own death is something to be proud of. It's not as if those who are successful ever get credit for their ingenuity - because that would kinda ruin it, wouldn't it - so let me take this opportunity to congratulate you on the ultimate makeover. You know who you are. It's just that no one else does. Not really.
