Last night's television made, I thought, particularly depressing viewing. Unless it is The Apprentice, there is no reality television I enjoy more than Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. His language and tantrums are work in a noble cause, the improvement of provincial restaurant cooking. But Gordon Ramsay's F Word (Channel 4), back for a fourth attempt to identify a coherent format, is a horrible programme, gratuitously ill-mannered, chaotically assembled and obsessed with celebrity, particularly the chef's. “Now shove off out of my kitchen,” he didn't quite say to fellow-camera hogger Geri Halliwell, whose only other crime had been to demonstrate her family's recipe for meatballs.

Ramsay, whose emotional age descends towards single figures in these shows, was keen to prove that his own recipe was superior and received its vindication among the diners at his notional restaurant with anything but magnanimity. Halliwell fed him a line. She said at Christmas her family competed to see how many they could eat. “So how many balls at one time have you had in your mouth?” he asked. She threw a gobbet of meatball at him. Somewhere amid all this we heard a moving account of her battle with bulimia. It took 20 seconds. Then she effed off.

Halliwell is a B-list celebrity and presumably glad of the gig. The C-list Peters family, whose members include a Corrie chippy and a Shameless barmaid, looked pleased as punch too to be ordered about Gordon's kitchen, although their weakest member, Kenny, was bullied so much he ended up doing a Frank Spencer impression to pacify his master.

Janet Street-Porter, who once had credibility as a journalist, was rechristened Janet Street-Pensioner and made to rear some calves as punishment for not having had children of her own; “Expectant Mother” flashed a caption as she went to market to buy them. But saddest of all was seeing James Corden, Smithy in Gavin and Stacey, that wonderful comedy he co-writes, playing the celebrity game, eating, blindfolded, unidentified cuts of Chinese food (ooh, er, chicken feet) and spewing them into a bucket before his overweight family. This is Gordon Ramsay's C Word - as in celebrity for one thing.

If the BBC had set out to make a season of anti-abortion documentaries it could not have done much better than with the Bare Facts season currently running on BBC Two. On Monday night in Teen Mum High we visited a school for pregnant schoolgirls each of whom was opposed to abortion and seemed to be blossoming under the twin demands of motherhood and academe. Last night's Abortion: the Choice showed all the emotional trauma of having a termination and precious little of the gift of life it can give back to women.

In interviews with the women the documentary followed, guilt, shame and denial all came up like boxes to be ticked. The one woman, a 25-year-old middle-class actress, who claimed to be at ease with her choice, failed to convince us. A sequence at the end showed a woman in great distress being counselled post-operatively, although it was obvious her real pain concerned her unresolved grief over her husband's death five years before. The session was followed by a sequence of a beautiful balloon being let go over a park. Flying up to heaven to join all the little foetuses, I suppose.

Finally, more gloom about the housing market. The second part of BBC Two's canny The Truth About Property titled A Solid Investment? concluded that it wasn't. To demonstrate the point our presentable presenters Andrew Verity and Jenny Scott interviewed a gloomy woman in Newton Aycliffe scraping the walls of a house worth less than she bought it for, an English couple whose luxury villa in Spain was about to be bulldozed to make way for a railway, and a desperately sad husband and wife in Skipsey whose house had fallen into the sea.

In a reworking of Dragons' Den, Scott took a thirtysomething called Lucy into a warehouse to pick apart her decision to put £20,000 down on a buy-to-let flat that would one day be her pension. Wodges of cash were slapped in front of her and then taken away again (capital gains, inflation etc.). The nest egg might end up worth all of £142,000. In the long run, we were told, shares will make you more money than property. But where, pray, are the perky programmes about the stock market?

Out of the Box

Big Brother was such a flop for Channel 4 last year that people started blaming its presenter, Davina McCall, which always seemed unfair to me. Her handling of the Shilpa Shetty affair earlier in the year, for example, I thought was masterful. Now, in Heat magazine, she has scotched the rumour she is leaving as “utter bullshit”. She will be back this summer and, she hopes, for series ten, too.

An ease in front of the camera is the essential quality in any successful presenter such as a Davina. In training courses, you are often told to imagine you are addressing your mother or your best friend. Sarah Ferguson, whose better diet show, The Duchess in Hull, is on ITV1 next week, has a better idea. “I imagine I'm talking to someone in the bath wearing a plastic hat, having a cup of tea,” she tells the new Radio Times.

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