Bare cheek

Normally I detest people who use laptops on crowded trains, but if you’re watching a DVD your elbows aren’t flying, and with earphones you’re no more of a nuisance to your neighbours than you would be reading a paper. So on a train crawling towards Bournemouth for the Tory conference, I set up the machine and popped in a preview disc of Trinny & Susannah Undress (ITV, Tuesday). At roughly the point where the couple they were bullying got naked and slipped behind a screen, an elegant middle-aged Frenchwoman took the seat next to me. The camera then went behind the screen and we saw the couple rubbing, stroking and kneading each other’s fleshy bits — nothing really rude, you understand, but implying a degree of pornography to come. I didn’t dare to look at the woman — she definitely didn’t seem as if she could have been cast in the old Cointreau commercial — but decided that for the moment it might be safer to watch H.G. Wells: War with the World (BBC2, Saturday) Silly me. Within minutes, Rebecca West was on top of the author, humping gleefully. I should have taken Debbie Does Dallas.

Trinny and Susannah’s show is pretty grim. They have jumped ship to ITV where it’s been decided that they should become marriage guidance counsellors. The couple they picked, Ellie and Lester, were in a bad way. They have two autistic children, hadn’t made love for months, she’d had a brief affair, and he wore white socks with sandals. T&S believe there is no problem in the world so great that it can’t be solved by the right clothes, so they set about doing what they always do, which is to dress their victims as if from the Littlewoods catalogue. Poor old Lester wound up in lovat, a colour favoured by elderly men in Scarborough.