Given the anguish and humiliation that Shilpa Shetty suffered in the Celebrity Big Brother house this year, the British public are probably prepared to forgive her almost anything. Even so, she is pushing her luck with this shoddy piece of opportunism. Our admiration for the grace and generosity with which Shetty stood up to Jade Goody and her ignorant, xenophobic cronies made a winner and a heroine of the Bollywood actress. But this ill-conceived, half-baked star vehicle does her – and us – no favours.

The show, scripted by the Bollywood screenwriter Niranjan Iyengar, blatantly exploits Shetty’s Celebrity Big Brother ordeal. She could have seized the opportunity to reveal the talent behind the controversy. Instead, she is content to reprise her reality TV role as proud, injured innocent. There are knowing jokes about her lip-locking encounter with Richard Gere and Celebrity Big Brother incarceration (“I’ve learnt that life can’t all be Goody Goody”), as well as platitudes about extending the hand of friendship across cultural frontiers.

Shetty certainly looks stunning, her body all muscular femininity, skin and hair gleaming. Her first appearance – in a midriff-revealing orange outfit – prompted whoops of excitement but when she wasn’t undulating her killer curves, impatient shuffling and muttering set in. Anyone who wasn’t paying attention between numbers – a selection of hits from Bollywood movies – didn’t miss much.

The preposterous plot, set in London in the near future, pivots on the conflict between an Indian dance teacher, Maya (Shetty), whose premises are under threat from the Olympic building programme, and a duplicitous Westernised impresario who wants Maya to add Indian spice to his company so that he can claim cultural diversity and win a spot at the Mayor’s Trafalgar Square gala. There are also Maya’s profoundly irritating neighbours and a beefy-but-sensitive love interest.

Needless to say, the spirit of togetherness triumphs in the end. Farfetched stories, overblown production numbers and sentimentality are all part of Bollywood’s appeal. But where The Merchants of Bollywood, last year’s touring dance-theatre extravaganza, thrilled with the scale and sparkle this show is lacklustre. The dancers are mechanical, the script diabolical, the acting amateurish and the costumes look nastily cheap. It all lacks brio and excitement; and though she is elegant to the last, Shetty alone isn’t enough to make it worthwhile. It’s a shame that, having endured Celebrity Big Brother with such dignity, she has gone on to capitalise on the experience with a substandard project that reeks of cynicism.

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