Michele Hewitson: Popular with the locals

The Kiwi girls in the beauty pageant with a twist.

I am considering making a complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority about Miss Popularity (Sunday, 7.30pm, TV2).

The grounds for this complaint will be that that Aussie bloke, Outback Jack, appears to think that our lovely Kiwi lasses are a bit thick.

"I want you to pair up, in groups of two," said Jack. Which means that either he thinks the Misses Popularity are idiots. Or that he is. The voting is still open on this issue. Feel free to vote with your remotes.

Miss Popularity - in the unlikely event that you missed the event of the telly year last night - is a reality show in which a bevy of girls are rounded up and made to think that they're competing in a beauty pageant. Then they're told they're going to live in a tiny Outback town. And they're going to live with the locals. And the locals are going to vote them off. Oh ha, ha. I bet that girl who said, "I don't want to be alone in a house with those weirdos", is regretting it now.

I bet that girl who suggested to the young lad of the house that he take her along for show-and-tell at school - "I could wear my bikini bottom because that goes down quite well in this town" - is regretting how the father laughed and the mother did not.

Those poor ladies. They turned up in their pretty frocks, their lovely hair sprayed into place, their white smiles plastered on. They showed their chests off to best advantage. They wore clothes that barely covered their chests, to best advantage. They turned to the camera, put their best bits forward and said things like, "I'm a girly girl. Being pampered is what being a girl's all about."

One shared, proudly, the fact that she has been wearing makeup since she was 10 years old. This girl, I think it was Diana - they're all so popular, except for a brunette, who isn't, that it's hard to tell them apart - has survival skills. She said her priorities go like this: "food, water, shelter, mascara". She thought about this, then revised her list: "In fact, probably food, mascara, shelter, water. You know, like, mascara's my thing."

Jumping into a croc-infested billabong is probably not her thing. Not to worry. The billabong - "calm on the surface but it's what's underneath that counts", intoned Outback Jack for the first, but not the last, time - didn't have a single nasty lurking in its hidden depths. I would like to be able to say that our Kiwi sheilas cared not one jot for the dangers of crocs, or the perils of running eye makeup, and leapt in, giving Jack the finger as they jumped.

But I suspect they're not as thick as they're supposed to be. Because how thick, exactly, would you have to be to believe that a TV production company who has been through a spot of bother with a telly stunt gone wrong, is going to allow you to be filmed being eaten by a yicky, scaly thing with very big teeth?

You'd have to be a moron. Which means that you, and me, are supposed to be the morons if we're intended to fall for this particular crock of a trick.

* Miss Popularity, Sunday, TV2, 7.30pm