TV eye: Out-barking the dogs

What could be more boring than a show about training naughty dogs? A new series of another show set in a hospital? The Office proved that you can make brilliant telly in the most boring of settings. That, of course, was the point.

What do a show about training naughty dogs and a new series of another show set in a hospital have in common?

The answer is: a groaning joke. It's Me or the Dog and Green Wing are both seriously barking.

It's Me or the Dog is a take on those ubiquitous telly shows featuring stern nanny types who deal with naughty tykes.

The dog lady is Victoria Stilwell, who is a sort of Mary Poppins for bad dogs and worse owners. She's quite cute, in a stern nanny sort of way. But boy oh boy is she tough.

Last week she got a couple of bad lab lads and their ineffectual owners under control.

The labs, two un-neutered lads, had many problems including peeing on their dad, Dave. This has a technical name: it is "excitable pee".

But the worst thing they did was humping. "Oh, we've got a bit of humping here," said Victoria. We saw lots of shots of humping, which is never an attractive sight.

The owners, Dave and Angela, were told sternly that the humping was a result of raging testosterone.

The cure was to have the dogs' bits cut off. Dave took some convincing. "I think it's the testosterone in me that's stopped me having them done."

Angela said, "I don't like to see two little dogs walking around without their bits. It's robbing of a body part, isn't it? Some people might not like them but I think they're lovely little plums."

That was quite enough, really. I'm not quite sure who will watch a show about dog training. Perhaps it's for dog owners who can then feel smug about their own dogs, in the way that I assume parents watch those shows about naughty kids - really rotten kids make their own look like little angels by comparison.

There is no conceivable reason for watching Green Wing, except that it has moments of inspired utter lunacy. The first episode of the new series was really a series of (dubiously) related skits about what you could do to a person in a coma.

Mac, the sex-pot doctor got to lie in a hospital bed while his mad colleagues played out various sick fantasies around his bed and on his body.

This was very mad and some of it was very funny. It included: making coma boy play ping pong, playing battleships with coma boy and making him play harmonica.

In case you ever need/want to do this, you stick the harmonica in the comatose one's mouth then push his chest. Drawing a moustache on somebody in a coma could be quite fun.

Showing him a porn mag and the resultant, aah, treatment, was far ruder than a couple of humping dogs. The characters are routinely awful and routinely mad.

The dialogue is like something you might hear at a lunatic asylum. "How's he doing?" said one.

"Oh, you know, unconscious."

"Tell him to try and get some rest."

Beyond barking.