TV Review:If there's no end to our voracious appetite for seeing celebrities incarcerated and humiliated, it's equally true that there's no limit to the depths celebrities will plunge to ensure our continued fascination with them.
So don't feel bad about watching Celebrity Big Brother. There's a grim reciprocity at work here: we look on, simultaneously entranced and revolted, while the celebs expose all the intimacies of their daily lives to our greedy gaze. Their prize is fame: ours, the grubby thrill of the voyeur.
While the bloody violence of gladiatorial combat may have been replaced with bitchy asides in the jacuzzi, the ancient lure of the amphitheatre remains the same. As usual, presiding over the baying crowds and hopeful contenders was - God help us - Davina McCall. She's worse than ever: shrieking like a parakeet on speed, her crazed toothy grins straight to camera made you fear for her sanity. But you've got to hand it to those wickedly clever programme-makers for this year's celeb pick'n'mix.
Yes, the majority of the celebrity contingent consists of ageing male has-beens and young female never-weres. (Leo Sayer and Jo O'Meara from S Club 7, anyone?) But oh! The potential for delicious interchanges between Jermaine Jackson (a man who, by his own account, is "very picky with germs") and the feral little punk Donny Tourette ("I wuz born wif a bad reputation, I fink"), who never lifts the toilet seat and has a fondness for coughing up copious quantities of phlegm.
And this time, Jabba the Hut-esque film director Ken Russell has stepped into the vacated brogues of John McCririck, as the colourfully cantankerous grandpère terrible of the house. Having already kept the producers busy with their five-second-delay button, as he swore, lurched and sang his way into the house, he's bound to ruffle the petals of the more tender female housemates. It seemed certain that Bollywood über-babe Shilpa Shetty - "I honestly truly feel that I am special" - would be reduced to tears before bedtime, if not by rude remarks, then certainly by her lack of entourage. Sometimes life sucks, baby.
There were disappointments of course - where was the much- heralded entrance of K-Fed (aka the former Mr Britney Spears, or FedEx, as we must now call him)? But the stage looks set for a particularly juicy bout of flirting, pouting, whispering and door-slamming, so sit back and enjoy.
Apparently Michael Jackson will be keeping an eye on the action too, but he doesn't need to use the telly like us lesser mortals. When asked by Davina whether Michael would be watching, Jermaine replied beatifically that "he has a way of seeing everything". Just like the omniscient Big Brother himself then, but with a touch more face powder.
NO SURPRISES THAT humiliation - of a more overt and manure-tinged kind - was also the name of the game on the Podge and Rodge New Year's Evespecial, fragrantly titled Bogmanay. Let's hope that Archbishop Sean Brady, who recently hit out at the "growing coarseness and aggression" in Irish society typified by the likes of these two feckless rogues, was safely tucked up asleep in bed before this particular visit to Ballydung Manor.
The usual bawdy humour prevailed with a vengeance, and the countdown to the New Year was led by a posse of male strippers with numbers from 10 to one emblazoned on their bare buttocks. Look away now, Your Grace, if you haven't done so already.
You can only assume that Jason Donovan was drawn by some kind of strange masochism to appear here so soon after his experience on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!. Did he not suffer enough? Poor old Jase seemed baffled by the crudity of the brothers' banter, but his fellow guest Mary Black was far more clued up. With rigorous self-control, she met all jibes with the bland stoicism you normally only get from soccer managers. Defusing mockery by the deployment of relentless cliche: that's a new one, at the end of the day.
And so the old year drew to a close in a stream of sexual innuendo, with the ageing popstrel girls from B*Witched, while a (thankfully hamster-free) Freddie Starr stumbled around pointlessly in the background. After Pat Kenny was named Feckin Eejit of the Year - for the curious incident in which he was likened to excrement live on air - there wasn't much more crudity that could be wrung out of the format, frankly.
Sometimes Podge and Rodge are worth a quick guffaw - after all, it's so far from the smarmy soft-soap approach of many mainstream interviewers - but there's only so many times that saying "feck" can be funny. Archbishop Brady's condemnation of the gruesome pair has been likened to George Bush snr's ill-advised attempt to make the American family "more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons". "Here we go, another stuffy old man wanting to stop our fun," people moan. It's a faulty comparison, though. Like The Simpsons, Podge and Rodge strive to be subversive. Where they differ is in their sophistication: love it or hate it, The Simpsons is packed with whip-cracking wit and superb characterisation, but there's just one joke with Podge and Rodge, and that's their blunderbuss offensiveness. I'm with the bishop on this one. But not because Podge and Rodge are rude - just that their rudeness is so dispiritingly one-dimensional.
A VERY DIFFERENT kind of rudeness proved to be the final undoing of TV cook Fanny Cradock, who straddled the British culinary world from the 1950s to the 1970s like a colossus in drag. In Fear of Fanny, comedienne Julia Davis was on blistering form as the imperious and flinty Cradock - a near-perfect evocation, from her ludicrously drawn-on eyebrows to her spoilt and discontented mouth. Cradock was the antithesis of today's generation of celebrity chefs. No warm and suggestive looks to camera while rubbing a chicken carcass, a la Nigella, not even the cosy yummy-mumminess of Rachel Allen.
Davis's Cradock was the domestic goddess from hell, mercilessly stabbing the poor fowl with a fork - "think of that neighbour you've never liked" - before ripping back its skin and stuffing mushrooms up its bottom. And that was as good a metaphor as any for the heartless way she treated the people around her, as she stalked through life in her heedless, self-obsessed way.
Mark Gatiss, as Cradock's long-suffering partner Johnnie, gave as understated a performance as Davis's was brash and in-your-face, yet his portrayal of Fanny's kindly, monocle-wearing and perpetually bemused whipping boy was quietly moving. And Nicholas Burns was another class act, in the role of Christopher, Fanny's weedy and ineffectual son, hopelessly in thrall to the force of his mother's personality. But both were inevitably eclipsed, not only by Fanny herself, but by the gaudy parade of dishes (Escoffier-inspired, she haughtily claimed) that streamed from her TV kitchen. No mi-cuit tomatoes or porcini mushrooms here: instead, viewers were offered shelled hard-boiled eggs transformed (with the cunning addition of pipe cleaners) into a majestic fleet of swans. Classy.
It was inevitable, given her appalling behaviour, that Fanny would end up alone and miserable. Her final moments as a disorientated old woman, her backlit orange hair forming a penumbra around her ghastly clown's face as she watched her inheritor Gary Rhodes on TV, were pure pathos. But was Fanny really such a terrible old bat? We'll never know, but anyone who insists on piping decorative blobs of salad cream on to eggs dyed midnight blue deserves a fate worse than death.
AS IF WE hadn't gorged enough on the rich diet of TV soaps and dramas over the festive period, up popped Harry Hill with his Christmas TV Burp. Hill, with his trademark outsize collar and mobile features, is a likeable enough bloke, who makes a living from regurgitating clips of recent TV programmes spliced with his own mickey-taking commentary. God knows, these shows deserve lampooning, with all their absurdly melodramatic yelling, slapping and plate-breaking, and Hill does it with a kind of affectionate grimace, which stops the whole thing from becoming patronising. "I feel stupid and useless and tired and empty," sobbed one tear-stained waif from EastEnders. Don't worry, dear, it's the way we all feel after Christmas telly. Tune into Celebrity Big Brother, and you'll soon be right as rain.
• Hilary Fannin is on leave