Recruiting nice kids takes sport out of show

The series Raise My Kids (last night, TV2) is the telly equivalent of those squawking plastic babies given to teenagers to persuade them against having a real squawking baby.

Raise My Kids "offers couples a try-before-you-buy scheme". What this means is that childless couples who are thinking about investing in a rug-rat of their own get to look after someone else's brats for five days.

So last night Tim and Monica got three kids, aged 10, 8 and 5, and the real parents secretly watched their progress.

This might have been traumatic for the kids but it wasn't really. Tim and Monica are friends of their parents so the kids are, presumably, fairly used to the fake parents.

And, presumably, nobody is very likely to wake up one morning and find that they suddenly have three kids aged 10, 8 and 5. That would be quite dramatic, I suppose.

Raise My Kids has to try to inject some drama into a series which so far has all the drama of a home video. As in: "38 seconds later ... their first crisis. Otherwise known as dinner."

Now, dinner involving three kids and two able adults might be a crisis if there was no food in the house and no money in the house with which to buy dinner. In this case Tim and Monica made sandwiches.

The second crisis was that the fake parents discovered that kids play with food, don't much like greens, and so on.

They also found out that if you let kids stay up late at night they will stay up late at night. And then they'll be a bit grumpy in the morning.

You'd think most people would know this without having to go to someone else's house and look after someone else's kids for five days.

You'd also think most people would know that it's a stupid idea to take all the kids to the supermarket when you have the luxury of a two-parent family.

Said Asher, the very sensible 10-year-old, "we don't really go supermarket shopping as a family". This is because, duh, it's too stressful, he said.

The would-be parents were hardly stretched. These were nice, well-behaved kids. If they'd been little monsters, ones who'd bash you over the head with a guitar rather than help write a nice little ditty to mummy and sing it at church, then maybe there'd have been some sport in it.

Still, it was too stressful for me. I'd rather take one of those screaming plastic babies home for five days than sit through another session of this stuff.

At least those doll babies are useful, if not at all entertaining. Raise My Kids is not in any way informative. Even I could figure out that when you take kids out for the day they need shoes and something to drink. As for the entertainment factor, cleaning up baby sick might be more fun.