BBC1's pathetic bid to get 'down with the kids' hits the skids

I despair of the BBC. Once a vital part of our national culture, they have completely run out of drive, ideas, judgement and credibility. Their latest wheeze, Stranded On Honeymoon Island, is a belated attempt to catch up with Love Island, Too Hot To Handle, Love Is Blind, Flex On My Ex and Look At Me, I'm Starkers (I only made one of those up). The BBC1 show incorporates elements of the equally dumb Married At First Sight UK. Single wannabes go speed-dating and choose their favourite potential partner. Then "relationship experts" pick the one they will "marry" in a not legally binding Philippines beach ceremony. They take the plunge, literally - diving off a boat to reach their honeymoon shack stocked with tins of corned beef. And after three weeks living alone together, with just bugs, scorpions, and a camera crew for company, they progress to Couples Cove where other options (i.e. different partners) are available... And they say romance is dead. Like a desperate auntie who can't act her age, the show is a cliched embarrassment. It makes a mockery of marriage and squanders licence fee money that would be far better spent developing mass-appeal comedies or a much-needed modern-day equivalent of the 1950s ITV show Free Speech. The only thing in its favour is it isn't Dating Naked UK. Give them time. It almost makes you pine for the cheesy innocence of Blind Date.

BBC1's imported hit The Traitors inspired lesser knock-offs like ITV's The Fortune Hotel and now Channel 4's ratings bomb The Inheritance. The premise is simple. Liz Hurley is dead - rigor mortis is clearly setting as she struggles with the autocue - and like The Traitors, contestants form tactical alliances, take part in dull challenges, and back-stab their rivals as they battle for modest chunks of Liz's loot. Lovely Liz is The Deceased and Robert Rinder is her Executor. But C4 missed a trick. Where is greedy villain Rachel IHT plotting to nab 40% of their winnings? Bigger pickings are at stake on The Guest a bash-the-rich BBC1 drama which opened with Fran's businessman husband Simon complaining that all the mugs in their mansion were dirty. "I know, we need a new cleaner," she replied. Wealthy folk can't wash up, you see. Fran set her sights on Ria, a hard-up self-employed cleaner reduced to pinching food from a supermarket donation point. Within minutes of hiring her, Fran gave her a Class War lecture: "Successful people aren't smarter or better than you, they just play by different rules," she Fransplained, adding "The only difference between private and comprehensive education is the mentality." Statistical evidence suggests otherwise. (Grammar schools, with their focus on excellence, did work which is why they were abolished.)

The implausible set-up included a frisson of homo-erotic tension and Ria secretly filming Fran (Eve Myles) getting jiggy with employee Richard for no apparent reason. The action picked up in the closing minutes as Ria cheated on her layabout boyfriend by bringing Mike, an online hook-up, back to "her" mansion. They took cocaine and got fruity in the designer kitchen. But Fran kept ringing, Ria panicked, and they fought brutally. (Point of order: cocaine makes people laugh at their own inane jokes, not batter one another senseless). At the death, Mike plummeted to his doom like Del-Boy's chandelier, just in time for Fran to arrive...The Beeb claim it gets better. We'll see. They said King & Conqueror was good and that has lost viewers like Starmer's losing voters.

Drama of the week was ITV's I Fought The Law. Sheridan Smith was magnificent as Anna Ming who, in real life, fought for 15 years to change UK law so her daughter's brutal killer could be retried. Should someone commission a sitcom about incompetent coppers who ignore cat burglaries and car thefts to collar TV comedy writers for saying the "wrong" thing? Decades ago, the idea would have been laughable, now it's a dismal reality. Five armed officers arrested Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan, 57, for the crime of making a joke the Met chose to misinterpret as an incitement to violence. Oddly London's finest didn't interpret Jo Brand's suggestion, on a BBC comedy show, that battery acid should be thrown in Nigel Farage's face as incitement.

Would the late John Sullivan risk arrest in today's Big Brother climate for creating Citizen Smith? After all that witty 70s sitcom popularised a job-shy, self-styled Marxist urban guerrilla who hero-worshipped violent mass-murderer Che Guevara...I'm kidding of course. Modern-day Citizen Smiths are busy calling the shots on mainstream TV channels, and drawing up the November budget. I'd have been more impressed to see police collaring Vashi Dominguez, the Spanish jeweller who has disappeared leaving debts of £170million. Richard Bilton's Panorama investigation suggested his business operated like a Ponzi scheme.

For the record no transwoman was punched "in the balls" in the aftermath of Graham's joke tweet back in April. There is a case for locking Linehan up though. Given the paucity of most modern comedy, he should be confined to a room with his old writing partner Arthur Mathews (also rock press alumni), until they create another winner.