By RUSSELL BAILLIE, FRANCES GRANT, GREG DIXON and FIONA RAE
1. Strassman
David Strassman, Chucky and Ted E. Bare - would the really ventriloquist's dummy please own up? How this has lasted series after series is a mystery wrapped in a weak joke.
2. Pavlova Paradise Revisited
British MP Austin Mitchell's revisit to a country he once cast an acerbic outsider's eye over was fluffy, crusty and without wit or revelation for a New Zealand audience. Someone forgot to tell him that he was going into telly territory many have traversed before.
3. How's Life?
Well not good if you're strapped to a chair and locked in a room and left to watch this. TV One's early evening advice show is not so much Beauty And The Beast as Beauty And The Bores.
4. Private Investigators
Back in the olden days, before no-fault divorce, private investigators shinnied up drainpipes to get photos of adulterous couples in the sack. The life of the PI was tacky and tedious. Now, in these enlightened times, we have a telly programme called Private Investigators in which a mother and daughter follow around adulterous couples and collect evidence which will be presented to the wounded party. How tacky and tedious.
5. Fear Factor
What's so entertaining about watching minor celebrities and major nobodies being buried up to their necks in earthworms or swimming in tanks of tiny alligators? It's Survivor without the scenery, the mind games, or the personalities. There was an age when we used to laugh at those mad sadistic Japanese gameshows. Now they're in English being introduced by some smarmy American as if it all meant something.
2002's worst telly
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