Why are these dead-eyed K-pop groups represented as some kind of ideal?

On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world by storm’. Unusually, this wasn’t TV hype. Last year, nine of the world’s ten bestselling albums were by Korean acts (the sole westerner being Taylor Swift). Even odder for people over 40, according to such reliable sources as Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment podcast and my children, South Korea has replaced America as the cultural centre of the Earth for many British teenagers.

But this global domination hasn’t come about by chance. Korean youngsters are trained for pop stardom on an industrial scale. While they’re being drilled in singing and dancing for up to five years, everything they eat, wear and, above all, post on social media is strictly controlled.

So how might a group of British wannabes get in on this distinctly foreign world? That’s the question posed by Made in Korea – and the answer so far is ‘not terribly well’.

The programme didn’t bring us the presumably oversubscribed auditions. Nonetheless, the five boys chosen to form a band seem appealing enough – if, for the over-40s, again not very recognisable from our own youth: a mix of Brit School graduates, cruise-ship dancers and people who get millions of social-media followers by posting videos of themselves gyrating about.

Before long, the five were off to Seoul to be put through their paces by SM management, who make no old-fashioned bohemian pretence to anything other than making money. At first, the boys appeared to think they were in for a rather jolly TV experience – and for a while they weren’t disabused. A bloke known as ‘the K-pop cowboy’ (and with the hat to prove it) showed them around the city wearing an expression of unflagging excitement.