It is all very well Tessa Jowell calling for a viewers’ revolt against reality TV, as she did recently. It just ain’t gonna happen. TV genre fads are like Californian bush fires. You have to wait while they burn themselves out, like the once-ubiquitous docusoaps now reduced to a few smouldering embers.

Jana Bennett, the BBC’s Controller of Television, recently announced a cutback in lifestyle makeover shows, recognising, to paraphrase Orsino in Twelfth Night, “that surfeiting the appetite is sickening and so dying”. The fire of reality TV, however, is consuming the pinewoods like matchsticks. Countless celebrity homesteads lie in its path, ready to go up in hot ratings smoke.

And the shows become more and more outrageous as producers up the stakes. You may have thought, for instance, that I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! plumbed new depths when Toyah Willcox was persuaded to scrobble about thigh-deep in stinking artificial poo. Well this week you can watch rival Eighties Pop Goddess, Kim Wilde evacuating copious quantities of the real thing in Five’s latest contribution, Celebrity Detox Camp (Thursday, Five, 10pm).

In this one-off, Wilde, the comedian Richard Blackwood, “socialite” Tamara Beckwith and Keith Duffy from Boyzone are whisked off to what can only be descibed as an “extreme health spa” in Thailand. Here they undergo colonic irrigation on an epic scale. Each is made to pump fourteen litres of a coffee solution up their backside twice a day for a week. The editing is as decorous as can be managed, but the sound effects are positively explosive, and, to anyone of an even mildly Rabelaisian disposition, absolutely hilarious.

In the meantime Granada have been commissioned to make a British version of an American reality show, Man Versus Beast, in which athletes “compete” with wild animals. It all seems pretty pointless. We already know that tortoises are pants at the hurdles. Even the soft-porn subscription channel Playboy TV are preparing a “reality” show called Double Entry – Making it Big where teams compete for the chance to make their own “adult” movie.

Most recent new shows have divided into two overlapping types. Subjecting minor celebrities to idiotic humiliations will grab most headlines, but this is run a close second by the shows which aim to transform the lives of members of the public. Faking It, The Good,the Bad and the Ugly and Second Chance have all done this, while Channel 4’s Trust Me, I’m a Teenager sees a team of spotty kids sorting out supposedly dysfunctional families.

The latest craze pioneered by the indie company RDF Media is for lifestyle swapping. Wife Swap, where families exchanged wives for a fortnight spending one week living by each of the two families’ rules, was a huge hit. Now RDF is planning Holiday Showdown (families swap holiday activities), Celebrity

Wife Swap and Celebrity Go Home where the celebs must spend a fortnight back with their parents living one week by their parents’ rules and another week vice versa.

Only litigation by reality show “victims” exercises restraint. Meanwhile advances in micro-surgery and genetic engineering will soon bring Celebrity Head Swap (Jo Brand and Linford Christie get to try out each other’s bodies . . . with hilarious results!) or Celebrity Safari Swap (contestants spend one week as a hungry lion and one as a sick wildebeest). Mrs Jowell, I fear, may have a long wait.

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