A walk on the tacky side

Readers of this blog, being people of taste and discernment, may well have missed a news story that provides both an aptly fitting fable for modern morality and an example of dramatic symmetry worthy of the most contrived Restoration comedy.

It concerns a television programme called 'Take Me Out', which the Times' Caitlin Moran today describes, with her customary pithy brilliance, as "essentially 'Blind Date' for the Rohypnol generation".

The show features male contestants displaying their wares - metaphorically speaking - before a panel of women, who express their reactions by the use of light switches, giving rise to what is described as the show's catchphrase, "No likee, no lightee" (frankly, I'm amazed that one got past the race relations people).

The victors in this sleazy enterprise are sent off for a weekend together for the subsequent delectation of the viewing public, and that's where the dramatic irony comes in. Last week, the Mail gleefully outed one winner, supposedly a construction worker, as a '£50-an-hour male escort' with a previous conviction for violence.

Spotting a clear opportunity, the woman who had been despatched to a foreign resort to enjoy his company with the blessing of the producers immediately claimed that she had been 'manipulated' into sleeping with him - this evidently being the expected outcome of the trip.

All was not as it seemed, however; two days later, the paper revealed that she, too had a secret - though working as a hairdresser, she had previously engaged in an altogether more horizontal profession at a princely £200 an hour (as with houses, the Mail seems to feel obliged to define escort services by price).

Thus these two photogenic young people, whose courtship was due to be observed with much the same prurient intensity as that of Edinburgh's pandas, turned out to be on something of a busman's holiday at the TV company's expense.

Not surprisingly, 'Embarrassed show producers have now decided to axe follow-up footage of the couple on holiday when the show airs again on Saturday night.'

Meanwhile, as the icing on the cake, other members of the cast - if that's not too cynical a description - are in trouble for holding a 'two-day mass orgy' in a rented mansion in Chepstow; a misdemeanour that has Zeitgeist written all over it.

To paraphrase the German writer Heinrich Boll, the fact that a competition to meet today's criteria of desirability was won by two members of the world's oldest profession is 'neither accident nor design, but simply unavoidable'.

'Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?'

It looks as if a new benchmark has been set for stupidity in the electronic age. This story has left me speechless - so I offer it in full for your edification.

A woman was plagued with almost 3,000 text messages and hundreds of calls after her mobile phone number was displayed on EastEnders. The incident happened last September when a message sent by Sam Mitchell was shown close-up on screen for four seconds.

So either the callers are blessed with eidetic memory or they actually went to the trouble of pausing the programme in order to read it. I know which one I think is more likely...

Above the message were two further texts which had apparently been sent from Mrs Edwards's phone, showing her business mobile number.

So far, so harmless - a simple technical mistake by the production crew. After all, no one would be stupid enough to call a number on a text from a fictional character would they?

The 39-year-old mother of two from Alvechurch near Birmingham was then deluged with calls and texts, with several asking: 'Is that Sam from EastEnders?'

Others, it seems, were less polite:

Mrs Edwards said: 'The calls just keep coming and I can't use my phone for my business. Most have been friendly but quite a few were obscene.'

Luckily Ofcom are there to provide the voice of reason, informing us that:

'We found that Mrs Edwards would not have expected her business mobile telephone number to appear on screen during an episode of a soap opera.'

You don't say! Ofcom added that the torrent of 'unwanted and abusive calls and texts was

' ...further added to after the repeat broadcast of the programme later that evening on BBC3'.

Which probably says more than we want to know about BBC3's viewer profile. However, nobody comes out of this story very well; according to the BBC,

'the number of calls and messages to Mrs Edwards's phone may have been inflated after she complained to the Sun newspaper about the incident and the number was clearly displayed in a screen grab published by the paper. '

Even allowing for repeat messages, that's still a depressingly large number of people who considered it a good use of time or money to call the number. Either random obscene callers are so short of imagination they need someone to show them a number to dial or viewers have epically failed to grasp that they are watching a work of fiction.

I'm starting to wonder whether universal suffrage was such a good idea....