When you think about it, Pete and Dud's most famous sketch is horribly politically incorrect. Yet the ghost of Moore's one-legged Tarzan haunted Britain's Missing Top Model, a version of America's Next Top Model with the twist of twists that the contestants were disabled. If Cook and Moore could have been bothered to explain themselves, I am sure they would have said they were not laughing at monopedes but at the naive optimism of a man who thought his disability was no handicap to playing one of cinema's most famous action men. But, obviously, there was to be no laughing at the ambition of these eight young women to become a top model.

Self-belief, condemned in a previous age as hubris, is the current culture's most hallowed virtue. The mighty tide of will is supposed to get you anywhere even if it is pretty clear to any observer that the mighty tide is often no deeper a bird-bath and that there is, as we psychiatrists call it, a whole lot of compensating going on for other inadequacies. What was being compensated for was there for all to see in BMTM. Indeed, the programme's ambiguous title invited us to look for what was missing, in most cases an arm or a leg. To make our job easier, the first task set by the game show was for the contestants to strip to regulation white underwear before a panel of judges and display exactly what they didn't have.

After the girls had each done their first photoshoots, however, a curious reverse disablist mentality took over the jury. Rightly, I suppose, the judges looked at what the contestants had to offer rather than what they lacked, but then Lillie seemed set to be chucked out not for her looks - very nice, thank you - but because she did not look disabled enough. Her mistake was merely to be deaf and, as judge Lara Masters argued, a “disabled model and actress”, this meant that while she might be a good model she would never be a great role model.

The judges were not to know that in the Big Sister House, where the girls excitably lodged, deafness was the most ostracising disability of all. In the end, one-legged Rebecca was eliminated instead, on the old fashioned grounds that she took a terrible picture. On the real Next Top Model a dismissed contestant is briskly shown the door. Here, Rebecca was given a pep talk. Perhaps you have to be disabled to be shown some humanity by reality television.

So many questions were ducked by this programme, not the least being what was in it for the fashion industry, whose job is to sell frocks not rid society of its prejudices. The whole thing was deeply paradoxical: the most lookist business in the world being asked to turn a blind eye to “physical imperfection”. What next? A top model picked from those afflicted by facial burns? The information that Dutch Debbie, who has one arm, posed for Playboy was particularly troubling. I once interviewed Alison Lapper, and the interview ended being reproduced in a fetishist magazine.

But if the issues were ducked on the show, they will have raged in the nation's sitting rooms. In ours we were soon talking about personalities not physiques. Jenny from Seattle, who has worked her car crash up into a very fine anecdote, is particularly irritating. “I may walk like Frankenstein but don't patronise me!” Marie Claire Editor, Marie O'Riordan, predicted that Jenny's “personality issues” would be an issue for her as judge “down the line”. They're an issue for us already, ducks.

The prize for Britain's Ugliest Top Company must surely go to British American Tobacco. Duncan Bannatyne, the sneery Scot from Dragons' Den, decided to take it on in BBC Two's reliable This World slot. He discovered that for all its assurances BAT was promoting cancer sticks to children in Africa and selling them for 2 pence each in Malawi, a country that until now has not been addicted to the weed. Bannatyne revealed a humanity that was unexpected but what he was clearly relishing was the Roger Cook moment when he would confront the company's directors. Shamelessly they - and that included Ken Clarke - scuttled to their chauffeured cars after the AGM leaving the company's sweaty “head of science” to deal with Duncan's inconvenient truths. He was “disappointed”.

Bannatyne confidently predicted that BAT and the other tobacco giants would continue to kill more Africans than either malaria or Aids. There could be no better proof of Joel Bakan's theory of the corporation as psychopath.

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