Ladies and Gents, we’ve got a hands-down winner for Most Lame Pointless Ill Conceived Tawdry Excuse For A Television Programme Of 2009. There will not be a show on this year that will stoop as low as Live From Studio Five (Five, Monday, 14 September, 6.30pm). Seriously. So dismal was the show that today, I nearly convinced myself that it may have been some kind of satirical joke about how bad television can be… but it isn’t. This topical tripe is headed up by Ian Wright, Melinda Messenger and Some Girl Off The Apprentice and seeing was (dis)believing.

Some Girl Off The Apprentice is in fact, the charisma black hole that is Kate Walsh. It was always clear that TV execs would make a bee-line for her eventually, what with her effectively being reasonably attractive (aka Not offensively ugly) and b)… well… I can’t think of a b). Maybe the closest thing I can think of is that TV execs thought they would capitalise on the success of The Apprentice by borrowing someone who failed on it?

What TV spudheads don’t realise is, just as Big Brother has largely shown, we all tend to forget about the participants of reality TV as soon as the show in question finishes. Anyone know what Charlie Uchea is up to these days? Anyone seen Nasty Nick Bateman recently? Hell, does anyone even care what Alan Sugar does when he’s not on The Apprentice?

Nosireebob.

So hiring some grinning idiot to sit beside two other grinning idiots with trace TV skills between them isn’t exactly a great idea for decent telly is it? Surely someone shot a pilot for this and thought “Oh my dear God… what have we done?”

Katie Price and Jermaine Jackson guested on the first edition and Walsh’s interview with the former Jackson Fiver was one of the most abysmal segments of television I’ve ever witnessed. In Jackson’s motionless vinyl mask of a face, you could almost make out his disdain for being interviewed by some no-mark with less skill that Tito’s bowler hat.

It’s no wonder that the show bombed in the ratings, getting a paltry 476,000 viewers, making it the 12th most popular show on Five that day.

That number of people witnessed this gruesome trio mugging at clips of some dogs on surfboards (as first seen in 3 B.C. on It’ll Be Alright On The Night 6) and the most abject interview ever conducted on air.

Melinda Messenger, the most charismatic of the three (I never thought I’d type that) did her best to talk to a man who found a grenade on his lawn whilst Ian Wright completely failed to understand that he didn’t need to conduct a lengthy conversation with his director over the top of it because of the invention called ‘an earpiece’. Kate Walsh meanwhile was invariably still saying “DOGS! ON SURFBOARDS! WHAT A WORLD!”

The show closed with some forced wackiness as The Apprentice reject tentatively shunted Ian Wright around on an office chair as he hammed up the spontaneous wackiness of it all.

Watching Live From Studio Five felt like choosing between having your genitals removed with garden shears or strangling your dearest family member with the flex from a handblender inserted down your throat.

Abject misery.