Obsolete: 10 weeks of absolute fucking hell.

It's the stinking putrescence of vanity, greed and idiocy that blares at you from the television, occupies the front pages of those excrement purveyors, the tabloids, and tries to infiltrate its way inside your skull, infecting your brain and turning it inexorably to a maggot-ridden decaying reeking orb, being eaten away as the very oxygen you breathe itself seems to have become stale as a result of the demoralising, blanketing vacuity of it all. It's the nose-wrinkling decomposition of all that terrestrial television once stood for, laid bare, eviscerated for all to see, completely inescapable unless you decided to board up your windows, smash the goggle-box, throw the radio out the window and stay in bed living on tinned food for the best part of 3 months.

While I agree with Septicisle about this pile of crap I pride myself on being able to pretty well ignore it completely. I should think I've seen less than 30 minutes of this show during its entire run and I reckon about 20 minutes of that was during the first series when, I seem to recall, a builder from Liverpool won. Overall I remember someone called Nasty Nick (?), a transvestite that looked like he'd been sucking stinging nettles, a woman who looked like a pig, George Galloway and Sly Stallone's gruesome mother. I have occasionally caught the show while channel hopping but usually I get either a fixed camera showing people asleep or mind-numbingly boring 'chat' between some (usually) utterly gormless women.

The real shame, as Septicisle points out, is that this show will take over the 10-30 Friday slot which was home to, amongst other things, the terrific 'Peep Show'. My advice is to sign up with the excellent Amazon DVD Rental by Post scheme and spend the next 10 weeks catching up on some of your favourites.