Car crash TV: Famous Rich and Jobless

If the future of state-owned television was to depend on programmes like this, you could probably wave goodbye to the BBC within a week.

TV is bursting at the seams with crap and pathetic programmes, but with Famous Rich and Jobless, as shown last week on BBC One, the expression 'scraping the barrel' plumbs new depths.

Presented as "[F]our famous volunteers [who] agree to swap their fame and fortune for a world of joblessness, job-hunting and surviving on the poverty line and benefits", it can only be explained as some producers spotting long-term unemployment as a last resort to milk the "docu-reality" TV frenzy til the last drop, whatever happened to dignity.

I'm not particularly clued up with celebrities, but out of the four "famous volunteers" armed with alleged "fame and fortune", I only recognised Archie Mitchell of EastEnders' fame and Noel Gallagher's ex-wife. The other two turned out to be a celebrity gardener who looks a bit like Piers Morgan and someone related to Camilla Parker Bowles. Wow.

Needless to say, the world really needed to know how they'd cope pretending to be on the dole for a few days. That's a fine piece of public service from the BBC.

Dressed as "putting unemployment in the spotlight", this is the televisual equivalent of those newspaper articles much en-vogue at the onset of the recession, when it was still dubbed 'the credit crunch'. Back in 2008, you couldn't count the number of reports and articles by journalists who'd give up dinner parties for a couple of weeks to take their stab at the Poverty Game.

Famous Rich and Jobless, however, is done in even poorer taste. What's particularly worrying is the fact that it crossed nobody's mind amongst scriptwriters, editors and producers that maybe the whole idea was corny and tactless to the extreme.

No-one there to notice that life on the dole is not a twatty experiment carried out for public consumption. That the feeling you have in your stomach when you can't find the cash to pay off those outstanding bills is not a week-only pursuit. That the pain, depression and anguish of not knowing if and when you're going to have another wage coming in has nothing in common with four Z-list celebs playing at surviving on job seekers' allowance for 7 days. That justifying that growing gap on your CV, which becomes more awkward as each week passes by, has got FA in common with Noel Gallagher's ex-wife trying to remind the public that she still exists.

And no matter how many tons of cheap techno and drum'n'bass the producers stuck during the editing process, no matter how many swirls of the camera, Famous Rich and Jobless would still come across as hopelessly crass and helplessly fake.

Recent weeks have seen the BBC surrounded by the controversy over its so-called "strategic review". With plenty of such car-crash television on offer on other channels, programmes like Famous Rich and Jobless seem like the biggest advert in favour of the most savage of cutbacks.