TV review: My Kitchen Rules vs House Rules

My Kitchen Rules hosts Manu Feildel and Pete Evans.

If it wasn't for the fact that I have already developed sofa sores, I'd have to have a long lie down after having spent what seems to have been an entire week watching the Australian version of My Kitchen Rules. This screens three nights a week (Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 7.30pm, TV2), for an hour, but it feels like much much longer.

Who gives up that much time to watch a bunch of Australians, many of whom appear to be suffering under the delusion that they're the next Heston Blumenthal - despite not being able to remember just how many cups of sugar they've added to a brownie mix, and despite thinking that a brownie with flopped meringue on top was a suitable offering for a cooking competition?

My Kitchen Rules is the telly equivalent of the fast food "restaurant's" up-sizing. More chips? Yes please. Bigger shake? Why not. Another slab of something fried that may have been an animal once?

Oh go on. Because we must like this stuff, otherwise why would it be spread across three hours of prime time telly a week?

I think they're putting something in it, some form of crack cocaine that somehow finds its way out of the screen and into your body and before you know it, you're hooked on this rubbish. It has no nutritional value. It may hurt your brain. It stops you reading brainy books. It is certainly dangerously addictive. I may even watch some more. I don't want to. But I might. Once you've watched one episode, you think: Oh well, what's one more cup of sugar when you've already had seven?

I suggest it as an alternative to the now banned synthetic cannabis. God, it's good.

It helps that it's Australian. We know how competitive those Aussies are, and there's always the chance of sledging. Jess, the designer, who is paired with her mate, the miner, is shaping up nicely. "Smells good," she said when the bank manager and his "gold-digger-trophy-wife-who-cares?" served a mud crab and angel hair pasta main on the table on their Queensland deck.

Their guests - the judges and the other contestants - had been waiting about two hours. To the miner, Jess said, sotto voce: "Looks gluggy." Also, it wasn't angel hair pasta. Unless, said Jess, it had come from an angel with dreadlocks.

The culinary disaster couldn't have happened to a nicer pair. The bank manager was a smug bugger; his wife of two years (a bit younger than him but who cares? Not them) thought she was the queen of seafood and the queen of puds. They turned out to be the king and queen of a fairly crappy dinner, and the scores corresponded: They were fairly crappy. Jess smirked.

How long does this go on for? Forever, seemingly. There is another group which includes "the skank and the stuck up cow", in their own assessment. I'd like to see skank and stuck up, up against the smirker and the miner in the final - although I could well be dead by then, which would be a shame. That episode would be even better than synthetic cannabis - more like synthetic heroin.

I'm not even remotely hooked on the horribly boring and aesthetically hideous House Rules Australia (Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, Sundays, 7pm, TV3) which, if you watch it on demand as I did, is brought to you by a painkiller, which you'll need. This is like The Block, but worse, and with Australians, two of whom decided that putting a basketball hoop over a laundry basket was an edgy and fun renovation idea. No legally available painkiller would be enough.