KEY POINTS:
I have seen the future of television and it is ... more of the same, but more so. More reality rot, and Corrie has got sillier than Cilla's DIY sunbed orange tan.
I was quite looking forward to watching Corrie in Britain. I got in the Walker's crisps, the jaffa cakes, the Tunnock's teacake. I had a pint of bitter at the pub over the road then went back to my room in Putney Bridge and put the telly on. Obviously I'm not going to tell you what is happening in the future on Corrie - hell hath no fury like a Corrie fan forewarned - but it's got beyond daft.
I blame those Londoner Baldwins they brought into the street with Frankie's flash clothes and the family's flash aspirations. You don't have aspirations on Corrie, beyond bedding Steve, I suppose. That's the whole pointless point of the thing.
Anyway, I felt quite sick after watching an episode, although that could have been the ill effects of scoffing a few too many jaffa cakes.
You should not eat jaffa cakes while watching the British take on making skinny bints top models. It is called Make Me a Top Model and it has vain blokes as well as twitty bints. It's like a cross between Big Brother and America's Next Top Model, which only means you get grainy fumblings in the night.
The first thing I watched when I got home was America's Next Top Model, which was the appropriate thing to watch when dwelling in the parallel universe that is jet lag. Top Model is becoming, like Corrie, something you could not watch for a year and nothing would have changed: same lines, indistinguishable skinny girls (we liked Shelley much better when she was a bit porky), and every now and then someone gets kicked off. Like Top Model, in Corrie the ones who get kicked off are invariably the ones you want to stay. And ghastly Gail and simpering, whining Sally continue on and on and on.
I also watched the new series of Trinny and Susannah in which, not content with rummaging around in people's wardrobes and humiliating them by slapping their fat bums, Trinny and Susannah are now, apparently, to be taken seriously.
Now they fix failing marriages. They do this by rummaging around in wardrobes and getting the couples to strip and go behind a back-lit sheet so we can observe them in silhouette examining each other's fat bums while saying what it is they like about the other's body. Then everyone, including Trinny and Susannah, spill a few tears and it's all happily ever after.
And what has happened to the lovely eccentric River Cottage? That's gone all reality too. It's become the River Cottage Treatment which makes it sound like a detox unit, and it is, sort of. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall gets people with aversions to eating proper food - food that is not plastic muck that comes in plastic wrap from the supermarket - and converts them. The papers were full of this nonsense which is like those ridiculous True Life stories: I Had Sex with my Husband's Sister, Oh and I have a Phobia About Eating Anything Green. There was a man who had such a phobia. Hugh tried to get a woman to kill a chook. There were tears.
Which almost made what was happening over on Corrie in the future look quite believable. That's if you believe those True Life stories: I Had Sex with My Husband's ... No, better stop right there.
Meanwhile, I came home to find a new channel, called the Documentary Channel, which shows lots of very good documentaries. Some of them are quite old, which is fine with me. There's too much reality in the future.
