Frances Grant: Women in a reality warp

The lure of the reality telly cameras never fails to stun. What on earth was Germaine Greer, radical feminist scholar and scathing critic of the show, doing in Britain's latest Big Brother?

That her appetite for confined surveillance lasted only a few days came as little surprise, however. Feminism, the old style at least — political, challenging — seems to have little to do on the telly except pack its bags.

Instead we have, for example, those aspirational models of modern independent womanhood, accidental internet porn star and shameless socialite Paris Hilton and her mate Nicole Richie.

The pair are back in The Simple Life 2 — Roadtrip for another display of all the freedom money can buy. The freedom to demand money, food and attention from the common folk and then sneer about them behind their backs.

Hilton and Richie are using the gains won by feminists introducing themselves to men with such lines as, "You're hot, are you married?"

With the likes of these two on the roads, it's understandable that America might breed some extreme reactions, although that didn't make timewarp documentary Texas Teenage Virgins any less scary.

Attitudes in the town of Lubbock, Texas would surely have Dr Kinsey's rug doing its famous impersonation of a hedgehog. The lack of sex education for the town's adolescents would have anyone's hair standing on end.

The pastors of the town, deep in America's Bible belt, fill the young with feelings of self-loathing about their burgeoning sexuality, try to get them to pledge virginity until marriage and tell them that if they have fallen into temptation, redemption from their dirty ways is possible through the attainment of "secondary virginity".

Sexual education is allowed only for engaged couples, and delivered in strained euphemisms. Women, one bemused couple were told by their pastor, are "slow cookers", whereas men are "microwave ovens". The pastor, obviously, is unfamiliar with the doings of Ms Hilton.

True to form, Lubbock, with its high rate of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, is testimony of the disastrous effects of denial and ignorance.

Across the Atlantic, a more novel approach is being taken to historic courting behaviours. In Regency House Party, a gaggle of young men and women from the 21st century are re-enacting the social mores of Jane Austen's England.

There's the usual signs of acute discomfort as the modern adjust to the strictures of period dress and lack of hair products. "It won't happen overnight," you want to tell the lankly coiffed lord of the manor. "And it won't happen for another couple of centuries."

The programme is a curious mix of historical fact and dating game. It is part living museum display, with participants speaking in the stilted courtesies of regency England, interrupted by oddly contemporary scenes. There's something disconcerting about a bunch of women in bonnets, saying things such as, "Have we been stood up?" I don't remember that line in Pride And Prejudice.

Another curiosity from Old Blighty comes in the form of floral detective show, Rosemary and Thyme, starring earthy, bucolic actresses Felicity Kendall and Pam Ferris.

The pair play a couple of landscape gardeners who solve crimes on the side. Strangled: one unpopular matriarch, in the study, with a plastic garden tree tag. It's Cluedo with herbaceous borders. The show is rather silly but Kendall and Ferris, in their smocks and gumboots, are wonderfully no-nonsense.

Now there's an idea for a reality show that might produce something a cut above the genre's usual inane interactions: Ferris, Greer, a Texan purity pledger and Paris Hilton locked up together in a green house. Blood might flow.