Stacked in Pam’s favour

A low-cut scarlet bathing suit is not suitable wear for browsing in a bookshop, unfortunately for the abnormally well-chested Pamela Anderson.

The former Baywatch babe looks to be positively chafing in the extra clothing required for her new sitcom, Stacked (last night, TV3, 7.30pm). But, like a trooper, she's making the best of it.

The kind of people who buy and read books may be sexually challenged, socially inept freaks - or in the case of the supporting cast in this show, downright fat or geeky - but if Pammy has to wear a cardy, she'll spill magnificently out of it, as she did all through last night's debut episode.

From the moment she burst into the book shop as Skyler, a busty, blonde bimbo in search of a self-empowerment manual to help her to ditch the no-good boyfriend, it was hard to focus on anything else, even for a viewer of the female persuasion.

Indeed, in one scene, the pubescent son of the shop owner stood transfixed before her bosom.

So famous are the ups and downs of her frontal assets, as chronicled in the celebrity press, it's hard to remember the pneumatic blonde is also supposed to be an actress. That her assets are on such display in this show doesn't help to jog the memory much.

The fish-out-of-water scenario is, of course, the premise of this flimsily conceived show which, surprisingly, has survived for a second season in the United States. The jokes must be destined to improve on last night's first outing. It's hard to see how, but the boobs-in-a-bookshop plot must have room for development.

The main joke in Stacked so far lies in Anderson heroically sending up her own well-stacked image. This is signalled by all the chest waving and lines such as, "Dad, we should take your girl friend swimming some time," from the aforementioned goggling junior. There were also many references to her penchant for mad, bad and dangerous men.

But Anderson's confidence isn't bullet-proof. The other females in the cast - one cold and snooty, the other obese and dowdy - seem to exist only to make her look better.

The males function either to drool "god she's beautiful" or as paragons of intellectual pomposity. Charles Mesure, who has appeared on our screens here in Street Legal and City Life, is most notable for his wavering attempts at some kind of English accent as the rocker boyfriend.

Stacked is stacked with cliched messages, such as don't judge a book by its cover. Its saving grace last night was the fun it poked at the lingo of self-powerment, such as, "I am captain of Team Me".

But given the creative calibre of bookish sitcoms on the box in recent times - Black Books, The Book Club - Stacked, despite Anderson's impressive frontal assault on the literary world, doesn't even begin to measure up.

However, a vanity sitcom at least requires more creative input than that other genre so beloved by ditzy blonde babes, the vanity reality show. Anderson at least deserves some credit for dramatic effort.