Evening Standard (London): Take one clever format ... and flog it to death

BEFORE Monday night's Teen Big Brother debut, Channel 4 promised us the show was a " challenging learning experience". And who could argue, when, within minutes of it starting, 10 18-year-olds - who palpably wanted nothing more than to be famous - were shown an instructional video on how to mend a loo deliberately blocked by the producers? Social anthropologists may care to know they found it "gross".

For anyone yet to tune in to this latest flogging of an exhausted format, C4 bosses claim the show looks at "citizenship, leadership, status, living and learning together". Basically it's 10 wannabe kids acting out the usual Lord of the Flies-lite somewhere in Elstree. Oh, and two of them have sex, and they're going to screen it later this week. We're told the momentous union (between Jade and James, trivia buffs) presented this least nookiedriven of networks with a dilemma. Heather Rabbatts, head of 4Learning, sighed that she predicted the headlines the moment news leaked. Most frustrating. Fortunately, she got around the problem by moving the show out of its intended daytime educational slot and onto primetime.

"To be fair to everybody," she explained, "you can't say there was sex in the Big Brother house and then not show it." God no.

One disappointment with Teen Big Brother is the decision to dispense with the usual lucrative phonelines designed to wheedle another wedge out of the viewer. Call this number if you think you're watching a social experiment. Or this one if you now view the Janet Street-Porter Network 7 years as a golden age for this network.

We are, after all, talking about the same creative geniuses who recently took irksome illusionist Derren Brown to an overseas location (Jersey) to play Russian roulette, a game he survived by way of complex "neurolinguistic programming" techniques and the fact no bullets of any kind were used. C4 publicity stated that a live bullet would be used, but when challenged on the lie would only twitter in an attempt at a rchness that t he event " powerfully demonstrated Derren Brown's abilities as a psychological illusionist".

Sadly, having once been a network on which you could rely for edgy, boundary-pushing television, C4 is now propped up by US imports and a few reality hits which, the moment they become successful, are bled so white their spark vanishes.

Big Brother and Faking It are brilliant ideas now on the critical list after being artificially bloated, meddled with, and twisted into inevitable celebrity versions.

CURRENT hit Wife Swap may face the same fate, while the schedules only emphasise the chasm between home-grown shows and American imports. "The Clinic (a docusoap set inside a plastic surgery clinic) will be followed by The Sopranos."

It is, of course, unfair to brand Four the new Five. What a cruel slur on that station's launching dictum of "football, films and f***ing" when C4 has no football and all the good movies are on satellite channel Film Four.

Forever's not that long in Hollywood ONCE again, the obsessively private Ms Catherine Zeta-Jones, left, has been tempted into a comment on her marriage to Michael Douglas. "I will never get divorced," she told a magazine, "Never." It's impossible for mere mortals to keep up with the Zeta-Joneses, of course, but why is it that celebrities feel moved to make these things matters of public record when the odds against lifelong marriage in their line of work are so famously short?

Just look at former spouses Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, who wore each other's blood in vials round their necks and repeatedly vowed they'd submit to the fires of Hades before they'd be parted. The next minute, someone asked Angelina where her other half was and she announced their divorce as though it were the least consequential U-turn in history.

It takes a special kind of confidence, no doubt, and I wish Catherine luck in living up to her pronouncements. Although on the plus side, till death us do part is a rather less daunting stretch in her case than it might otherwise be.

Oh gosh Ms Amiel, what was I thinking?

So fragrant she can't go wrong IN a most shaming development, the views I expressed here last week on the matter of footballers' "roasting" sessions have angered Ms Barbara Amiel, who has taken me to task in her always-readable Daily Telegraph column.

To recap, I suggested that, among other things, there might be some unresolved issues among a group of men who could have 10 girls each, but preferred one between them, and mused on this roasting as a sort of extended goal celebration.

Ms Amiel scoffs at suggestions that the staunchly heterosexual footballing community could be in any way repressed, and makes the important point that there must be something in my water. An alarming diagnosis, but then if you drink tap, you will pay the price.

And, given I hear Ms Amiel is an obsessive Millwall fan with season ticket seats in the Upper Manolo Blahnik stand, I bow to her expert view that roasting is merely a new and dangerous form of terrorism. PSYCHOLOGIST Frank Furedi claims that counselling causes more depression than it solves. If the news about Steve Martin's career is to believed, he's spot on. Showbiz folklore has it that Steve was driven to therapy after British comedian Paul Kaye, dressed as "reporter" Dennis Pennis, accosted him at a premiere and asked: "Hey Steve? How come you're not funny any more?"

Who knows what was said to him on the psychiatrist's couch, but he emerged with the extraordinary confidence to square up to Phil Silvers's memory and remake Sergeant Bilko as a movie. Not content with that calamity, Steve is reported to hijack yet another role defined by its original occupant - that of Inspector Clouseau. Can Fawlty, the Movie, be far away?

I HAVE no idea whether Betsy Duncan Smith did the secretarial work for which her enduringly tedious husband paid her, but my advice to her would be to head straight for the courts to resolve the matter. Just examine any picture of Betsy, even the one with her hair going mad on the Blackpool front. Is she not for all the world the ultimate embodiment of that quality that seems to most impress high court judges: fragrance?

Anyone who felt this description of Mary Archer must have been uttered after a better than usual lunch for milord could not deny that dear, laughing Betsy with her sparkly eyes and open smile would charm almost every occupant of the bench. Best keep him indoors off the stand, obviously.