KEY POINTS:
Nobody has called anyone else trailer trash on The Nightmares Next Door (last night, 7.30, TV2), but it can be only a matter of time.
When you take five categories of annoying neighbour and plonk them in an isolated village made up of trailers and watch them fight (and call it a social experiment), trailer trash has to be an insult ripe for the picking - even when this is a very English sort of social experiment.
It is no such thing, of course; it is reality telly. Even when you add to the mix a senior lecturer in psychology. Dr George Erdos is a real senior lecturer in psychology, but he looks as though he's a made up-for-reality-telly psychologist. He's a cliche. He has the colourful bow ties and the Hungarian accent.
He's designed this experiment (really? It has desperate idea from reality telly producer written all over it) to examine ways of conflict resolution in the community.
I think it's a brilliant idea. Send a bunch of ghastlies - the noisy neighbours, the neighbours with five ghastly, barking, pooping dogs, the foul-mouthed mother with the vile children, the busybody; the hard-drinking students - and make them live next door to each other. In this case, for only four weeks, but why not forever? Then they might not come and live next door to me.
The dog people, a mother called Carmen and her two grown-up daughters, are almost sane. Well, as sane as you can be when you think, as Carmen thinks, "I was a dog in another life. I strongly believe that." Almost sane, I said.
The first episode had everyone turning on the muvver wif the mouff, whose English is more incomprehensible than the professor's.
Carmen had said, of those mutts: "They're little people; they're just like children. They don't have children put down when they're naughty, do they? Why should you have my dog [put down]?"
Oh, have the lot of them put down. By the end of last night's episode though, I was, given a choice, for putting the kids down. I even found myself barking for the dogs when one nipped one of Wendy's kids.
There was a meeting, called by the busybody, Simon. Wendy, pissed on Alcopops, or even sober-ish, was intent on tormenting him. This was fairly sophisticated torture and involved calling him Doris.
She got hers at the meeting. She fled in tears and decided to stop calling Simon Doris and offered to cook him a roast dinner. Perhaps she's not quite as stupid as she appears. She switched to being a cow to the dog people.
Dr Erdos, we are told, is "not at all concerned about the rifts opening up in the community".
No, well, we'd have to be stupid to think he would be, wouldn't we? So silly we'd think this really was a valuable social experiment.
