Olivia Lee’s Naughty Bits (C4)

Smile – you’re on Candid Camera? Not bleedin’ likely if the whole nation is laughing at you. You had to feel for the victims in Olivia Lee’s Naughty Bits, particularly the chap she cornered in a bathroom showroom, claiming to be his girlfriend. She wanted to know why he had a problem with intimacy, and interrogated his many failings. The guy looked on bemused: he didn’t know that Lee was a comedian with an arsenal of hidden cameras. He took her intrusion in good spirit. That was admirable: there are so many crazy people out there, one’s natural reaction might have been to call the police.

Lee’s show works on a brilliant premise though – that Carrie Bradshaw is the most annoying person on the planet. So Lee’s character, desperately searching for love, mad and delusional, stalks men in a deranged quest to find Mr Right. The mickey-taking of Carrie is easily the funniest thing, even if it is one-note: Lee bashes away on a kid’s typewriter play-set, witlessly musing on what she has done wrong so far and what she can do to snare her ideal man.

This was very very funny, if you find Carrie to be beyond irritating and never more so than in those scenes in Sex and the City where she lies on her bed asking the dumbest of questions in voiceover: “So I got to thinking . . .” Like Carrie, Lee’s character runs about in diaphanous dresses with huge appliquéd rosettes. She just needs a bus to splash her.

The great British public seem worryingly at ease with a woman assailing them and acting insanely. One lady kindly lent her make-up, which Lee used to make herself look like a cat. A guy in a sofa shop had to put up with her acting out being his girlfriend. A doctor collared by her elderly Jewish momma incarnation (Bubba Barbara, desperate to marry off her daughter), was left scratching his head when both women ran off when he revealed he was married – and therefore unsuitable.

Perhaps this is one of the positive outcomes of reality shows and living with CCTV cameras on every street corner: everyone thinks they’re on TV all the time so behaves utterly nonchalantly in bizarre situations. A special mention to the shopkeepers who remained so equable when Lee went in with a toaster with what she insisted was a faulty hard drive. “It’s a toaster,” one of the men repeated. She left, muttering about feeling patronised.

The Wrong Door (BBC Three)

The comic strangeness was also prevalent in The Wrong Door, a sketch show that relied heavily on technical and CGI trickery. One very funny sketch featured a group of sprites escaping from a bottle and making a poor drunken fool’s life that much more horrible by texting a malicious message to his girlfriend and framing him for watching hotel porn.

One young woman was dating a dinosaur, as in Tyrannosaurus Rex, who visits her parents’ home and destroys everything within, including eating the family dog. A robot stomps over London asking where it left its house keys, destroying swaths of the metropolis. The show is hit and miss – Superhero Tryouts, an X Factor for wannabe superheroes, was laboured and directionless – but the writers Ben Wheatley and Jack Cheshire (who also direct and produce) have at least originated a novel and bizarre show.

Their strangest creation, and the most brilliantly maddening, is a scientist’s unfortunately successful attempt to create a new life form. Somehow a malformed DNA structure means that this creature is the most irritating thing on the planet. The scientists hate it. We hate it. This creature destroys everything it touches, but only after wheedling, pleading and manipulating. “Are we there yet?” it repeats. Eventually, the guy who took the creature in drove at a post to end it all.

SuperDoctors (BBC One)

In the continuing quest to deconstruct the semiotics of Professor Robert Winston’s moustache in SuperDoctors, we come to Puzzled Tache. Last night he contemplated stem cell research; contemplated being the key word – this is the TV equivalent of slow food: thoughtful yet satisfying. But he seemed to come to the same conclusion as last week, with robots being used in operations. We met people who were having or had experience of stem cell research. The Prof’s moustache talking to them bristled with kindness and sympathy.

Were stem cells the great hope or snake oil, he asked a physician. Well, we don’t know. One patient said he felt better after having stem cells used to treat his heart condition, but he had had another procedure that may have explained his feeling of improvement; medical tests showed he hadn’t improved that much.

Just as it seemed we were heading towards another qualified conclusion (progress is good but be careful), Winston said he thought stem cell research would inevitably cost lives, but that, if conducted properly, it would aid scientific understanding. The bushy outcrop assumed a new shape: Wise and Decisive Moustache.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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