Footballers' Wives

ITV1, 9.30pm

Britain's Worst Performer five, 9.00pm

Television must be the only industry in the world that can persuade its customers to adore tat. It is a strange process of miseducation by which, over time, the risible and the ridiculous have managed to become cults. Even more mysteriously, programme-makers now set out to cultivate the taste.

How often do you hear a show described as ''enjoyable rubbish''? Just when did ''so bad it's good'' become a cliche? It is as though we have all but given up the unequal struggle to find an entire evening's worth of programmes worth watching and instead surrendered to the idea of ineptness as entertainment.

They certainly don't come much less ept than Footballers' Wives. You can take your pick from its rich array of bad points. First, there are all the daft names given to the women - Amber, Chardonnay, Shannon and the rest - as though their mothers conceived somewhere between the perfume counter and the off-licence.

Then, inevitably, there's the script, generally a confection that sounds as if it was knocked out by an off-duty agony aunt who understands the offside rule. Players are known to be careless with money, but having Conrad, the latest star at Earls Park, owe (pounds) 3m to the Triads - whose chief weapon, we learned, is liquidised poodle - seems a mite extravagant. Conrad, a Beckham figure, may be dimmer than the far side of the moon, but he's not half as stupid as the plot.

Elsewhere, Kyle was wasting his youth in gambling dens and losing the captaincy to the new boy because his manager liked to stir things up. The sulking player was also beating up his mother, probably a capital offence on ITV. Meanwhile, Tanya was going through the motions of attempting to seduce Conrad before staging a punch-up with Amber that almost defied description. Put it this way: it made the actual football look plausible.

But who am I to quibble? The frocks may be more believable than the acting, but Footballers' Wives is a certified hit for ITV1. It contains lots of pretty people, some sex, flash cash and a bit of football: in short, it covers the bases of popular culture. Its audience doesn't seem to mind that even fantasy should have some sort of relationship to reality. Nor can you argue that loving or loathing the show is just a matter of taste: taste is the enemy of this sort of drama, if drama is the word.

''Entertainment'' was a word that drifted like a distant mirage through Britain's Worst Performer, perhaps the perfect example of a show that celebrates the delusions of the talentless and recycles them for our vicious pleasure.

Quite why Quentin Wilson, otherwise an able motoring journalist, has got himself involved is impossible to explain. The format, in any case, is familiar. Take your obvious no-hopers, have them trained for three-days by professionals such as Bobby Bragg (who?), and then subject them to some entirely irrelevant tests to discover who is the worst.

I say irrelevant because, for my money at least, the most useless act was obvious from the start. The ''James Bond impersonator'' reminded me of the bit in Spartacus where all the slaves claim to be the hero: ''I'm Sean Connery.'' No, pal, you're not. Your resemblance to your

supposed subject ended

with the fact that you both possess arms and legs.

Still, although I was quite taken with the Elvis act devoted to the singer's ''dead period'', complete with corpse make-up, I still could not get over the fact that this was rubbish-on-purpose, stuffed with acts you would pay good money to avoid. It was a show that screamed ''cheap'' - a karaoke singer who can't carry a tune; there's a novelty - and seemed to glory in its own awfulness.

The producers probably think there's something cutting edge about humiliating an aspiring comic who would only get a laugh if he chewed his own foot off. Instead, it was simple cruelty, zoo TV, and one step away from a freak show.