Half-hearted satire

Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, Saturday); Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday); Saturday Night Live (NBC); The Sarah Silverman Program (Paramount, Monday and Tuesday); Desperate Housewives (Channel 4, Wednesday)

I don’t want to come over as obsessive, but I was delighted to see the return of Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, Saturday). This show, which has huge ratings, assails everything on television that is stupid, shoddy, lazy, contemptuous of the audience and generally rubbish. Last weekend the main target was Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday) which I mentioned a fortnight ago as a terrible example of what happens when the Beeb turns bad. Clearly Harry Hill, or someone on his production team, takes exactly the same view. Hill evoked ‘the vision laid down by Lord Reith’ — a cliché but always a good cliché — then showed a clip of Dale Winton, who presents HITW. ‘How would you feel,’ Dale was asking, ‘about seeing your favourite celebrities dressed in skin-tight silver Lycra, then facing a huge wall hurtling towards them with a most unusual hole in it, and having to bend their bodies into the oddest shapes ever, just to avoid being plunged into a pool of cold, cold water?’

Hill’s angry sarcasm — ‘It’s the Reithian vision!’ — was slopped all over this dire programme, not least because the ‘favourite celebrities’ are people most of us have never heard of, such as ‘top ballerina Noushka Hanly’. (I find that earlier this year she played a horse in Equus, in Cardiff.)

‘She’s everywhere you look!’ said Hill, his persona as an affable lunatic barely masking the irony.

TV Burp does slightly undermine itself by cosying up to the people it’s attacking, so top ballerina Noushka Hanly was invited on to the show, presumably to indicate that they don’t want to be unkind and that she is a good sport.