Footballers' Wives cartoonish and plotless

If it wasn't so ludicrous I'd be tempted to say that Footballers' Wives (9.30pm, TV2) has lost the plot. But Wives has no plot. It simply has a series of completely bonkers storylines involving cartoonish characters bonking, shopping and scheming. And that's just the blokes.

Similarly, to say that Wives has got nasty is ridiculous, because nastiness is its stock in trade.

But, previously, its nastiness has been so ridiculous as to be the stuff of the cartoons the characters rightly belong in.

Where else, by way of a particularly barking example, would you have found a storyline involving one of the wives' dogs being made into curry by the Triads who were blackmailing her hubby, and served up to her guests at a completely over-the-top housewarming party?

That was Amber's much-loved doggy, Simba. Now she's got a new one. This is the central philosophy of the wives: husband murdered? Oh, get a better one.

The new doggy is called Krishna in a nod to Amber's Bollywood ambitions and cultural posturings. (She has a giant gilded Buddha in her bedroom.) At the end of last week, Krishna was seen doing something very nasty to a baby. But which baby? Is it Amber's baby to Conrad? Or is it uber-bitch Tanya's baby to Conrad?

Of course, Amber's baby is really Tan's baby because Tan, with the help of a very nasty nursey, switched the brats at birth because Tan's baby is not very likely to be Con's baby.

This might sound confusing, but it's not. On Wives everything is made very, very simple. Just in case those who are watching are as stupid as the characters they're watching.

You're left in no doubt about what's going on when Hazel, the team's spin doctor, says of Tan's baby (which is Amber's baby): "Got a bit of the tarbrush in you, Tan? Got a nice little sun tan, your boy."

But the lost-the-plot bit is the rape of a girl by one of the footie players at a party in Spain. This is just plain nasty. And although she will no doubt get her revenge - this week she turns up, disguised, to work for Tan and Con - there's no place in something as silly as Wives for an examination of serious issues.

You can't have a show which has a dog being made into curry, and that being so mad it's funny, and a young girl being raped, which is never going to be funny.