TV dinners are turning my stomach

I like a documentary. No scratch that, I bloody love them. Recent gems have included Inside the Human Body, Louis Theroux’s mega-jail horror, and (only available to the lucky few Scots viewers) The Scheme – subtitles essential.

I am not entirely sure about reality shows, but as they feature on most channels most days, and watching TV is infinitely cheaper than going to the pub, going out for dinner, or the incredibly expensive – going the cinema, I’ve been tuning in.

I do think that the term ‘reality’ should be applied somewhat loosely. Watch The X Factor, tune in to The Apprentice, sit through Saturday’s episode of Britain's Got Talent, and every one of these lunatics will have been vetted in a process as picky and rigorous as any Hollywood casting session.

Apparently though, reality isn’t quite real enough, and so the latest craze is ‘reality drama.’ These are really taking off. These follow real people as they go about their real lives doing real things – things that might have been only ‘slightly’ changed for dramatic effect. Right...

It started in America – of course it did – with The Hills (a load of spoilt LA brats) and moved to the UK with The Only Way is Essex (a load of spoilt Essex brats). Now we’ve got the horror that is Made in Chelsea which is about – wait for it – a load of spoilt Chelsea brats.

I sat down and braced myself, because it's easy to paint a bad picture of posh people; Chelsea is, after all, rather notorious for its landrover driving types.

Made in Chelsea kicked off with a bloke who did something in diamond-mining. He'd spotted a girl called Caggie whom he thought was "parfect, yah". She was wearing a fur coat indoors and his friend reckoned she looked "endangered".

I think he was trying to make a joke. How we laughed.

There was a pretty girl with hair so messy that she had clearly spent at least 5 hours making sure that she looked like she had never met a hairbrush and had in fact just had a fight with  a hedge. She wanted something to eat. "Chelsea girls don't eat! Guffaw" exclaimed a nasal man in a velvet suit.

"This one does," said the messy haired girl. When the velvet suit man sneered back "I know, I can see the cellulite," I judged myself for not turning off.

Ollie had a problem with his hair. Personally I feel his problems were more deep rooted than that, but he was worried his “once fabulous” locks were now “utterly crap darling.”

Luckily his hair worries were forgotten when he, Cesca, and Binky decided to escape to the countryside for the weekend because, as one of them put it so well, "I get bored of pavements."

Cesca said she felt like a "hefferlump". Binky asked what a hefferlump was. "It's not a real animal," said Cesca. "It's a bit like Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh."

"Who wrote Winnie the Pooh?" asked Ollie.

"Charles Dickens," said Binky, with all the confidence that the privileged are born with. "No! He wrote Pride and Prejudice," Ollie snorted through his hair.

"Actually," said an appalled-looking Cesca, "he wrote Victorian novels such as Great Expectations." Binky had heard of that – proof, she thought, that she was actually rather clever.

Turns out, you can’t fake that level of stupidity. Maybe Made in Chelsea is real after all.