TVReview: Emma and Nicola don't like their new dad and they don't want to wear scarlet bridesmaid's dresses to their mother's wedding.
If their mother was a real Barbie doll they could get the scissors to her yellow hair and scribble all over her face. But their mother's not Barbie; she's Julie and she's in love - again.
"Something really, really moved inside of me and turned my legs to jelly," said Julie of her wedding to Stuart (I suspect it may have been the tiramisu). "I think it's what you'd call tantric," she said of her first date with Stuart, when they gazed as unblinkingly as a pair of halibut at each other across her terracotta sheets. "I feel," said Julie, "that there is a pillow of love around me." Throw it over here Julie, I feel an overwhelming desire to smother myself.
Julie and Stuart were one of eight couples in The Seven-Year Itch, filmed on their wedding days and then at various points in the ensuing years. The ill-matched participants included Michaela, a self-described "hormonal Beelzebub", whose marriage to Ben ended after 18 months and who is now planning to marry Steve, who flies planes and is "just about perfect". If Steve doesn't pop the question soon, Michaela is going to have his 36-year-old sperm frozen because Michaela is a girl for whom quality is important.
Then there was Tom, the crazy-golf-playing naturist whose libido was trickier than his putting, and whose increasingly demoralised wife, Madeleine, exhausted from running their fish-and-chip shop, was getting the boot (if he was wearing one) because, as she was forced to admit, she just wasn't up to "swinging from the chandeliers when I'm buggered". This slice of reality TV, touted as a portrait of modern marriage, had more carnage than an abattoir and played like a matrimonial freakshow.
Julie was unavailable for comment on the dissolution of her marriage. She wasn't around to pick over the entrails of her pillow of love as she'd gotten out of bed a couple of weeks before filming, gone down the shops for a packet of fags and never come back. She had run out of bon mots for Stuart, signed her children over to her ex-husband's parents and skedaddled off to New Zealand with her new boyfriend.
Dorothy Parker said "marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet". With bedfellows like that, I can't say I blame her.
Romance on TV, and its sometimes dire and unpredictable consequences, unfortunately didn't end with the itch. The Ex Files, RTÉ's new dating show, planted a juicy big kiss on the cheek of reality TV this week too. The format is a devious little hotbed of potential treachery. Lucy Kennedy (who has very nice teeth and can say things like "come on", "go away" and "amazing" with gusto) introduces a "contestant" (this week a cocky 23-year-old from Tuam called Michael) to three of his ex-girlfriends over three consecutive nights. They have dinner and then go back to their hotel, their bedrooms - tantalisingly, vindictively - side by side. After the three dates Michael chooses which of the exes he will take on an exotic two-week vacation, with the catch that the chosen ex can then either accept his invitation or opt for €3,000 instead. It's probably not that bad an idea for a dating game for grown-ups; unfortunately, however, Michael and his exes had the glamour and sophistication of a pre-packed cheese slice.
Michael, having had two (we were led to understand) "successful" dates, chose Una in the end, the (very chilly) "fish that got away" who clearly would have rather run naked along O'Connell Street on the eve of the All-Ireland than go across the road with him. She took the money. Michael reacted with stoicism and a little trembling of his well-shaved chin.
Jack Bauer is grinding his way through another long day in the immensely popular drama series, 24, now ticking over nicely in its exciting and morally dubious fourth series. Each episode represents one hour in the 24-hour period Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) has to solve a major crisis threatening the United States. This time, Bauer is on the trail of a suburban Muslim family who have kidnapped the secretary of state and his daughter. This is Bush's America in bite-sized pieces, and so excessively and obviously does it play on well-stoked fears about homeland security that it almost makes you laugh.
At this point in the story - and it's still not quite noon - the Secretary of State is being held in a cage, wearing an orange jumpsuit, having been charged by his captors with crimes against humanity. The couple behind the kidnapping have asked their son to kill his pretty, white, innocent girlfriend in the pink cardigan because she may have inadvertently seen something, but when he can't summon up the necessary ruthless fanaticism, his mother poisons her lemonade instead.
Meanwhile, an innocent computer programmer has almost been kicked to death by a bunch of terrorists, Jack has held up a filling station and - get this - the schizophrenic daughter of the new head of the counter-terrorism unit has been rude to the next-door neighbours (hold her without trial for a couple of years on a Caribbean island?).
You're only ever four feet away from a celebrity, apparently - oh no, that's a rat, isn't it? Whatever. This week, yet more once-I-was-a-little-bit-famous-now-I've-got-a-publicist celebrities were up to their self-torture tricks in far-flung places again. Extreme Celebrity Detox, we were warned, contained scenes of nudity and projectile vomiting. Yes, and scenes of a dodgy English guru (looking uncannily like Ronald Biggs) swinging a bottle of water from his scrotum (genital weight-lifting, apparently, designed to harness sexual energy).
The celebs - in bunches - were variously sent to Thailand to release their sexual energy, Slovenia to conquer their fears (via a bit of Tai Chi and ledge-of-mountain sleeping), or the Himalayas to detox with Piers, an obtuse and skinny chap who believes the world is a hologram.
Take your pick.
Himalayan detox proved to be the most vicariously nauseating of the "workshops". The celebs drank their own urine, stuck catheters up their noses and indulged in some DIY colonic irrigation.
"I think that's a really seductive idea," said Lisa, former DJ and Big Brother housemate, before slugging back five litres of saline solution and whooshing it around her body with yogic aplomb.
In Thailand, Rebecca Loos went commando in a sarong and slow-danced with a woman in a Hallowe'en mask, while the course leader initiated his unwilling pupils in a bit of "solo cultivation" (hitting the testicles so as to feel the full force of orgasm without dissipating energy), a practice which might have been more plausible if he hadn't encouraged them to "play their flute of fantasy" at the same time.
In Slovenia, meanwhile, Jack Osbourne bungee-jumped off a tree, scaled some inhospitable lump of granite and phoned his dad - they didn't say which activity was scariest.
It is all madly pointless. And, barring a touch of schadenfreude and an occasional quiver of incredulity, deeply depressing. One would be better off lying in the bath with a bottle of Rescue Remedy and a couple of cucumber slices over the eyelids.
Half a dozen evacuations later, in a little hut on the side of a mountain, Lisa raised her head and looked at the view. Saliva dripping down her chin, jaw quivering with shock, she said: "I feel absolutely rubbish, but there's so much clarity." I can say with clarity, hand on chakras, there is so much rubbish out there, I'm off for a detox.
