Guantanamo Bay… Hades… Jockie Wilson’s urinal… all these places are holidays in the sun compared to the cruellest, grimmest place on Earth – The American Education System. American schools are teaming with the most hateful, unrelenting pricks. The kind who trip you up in the halls… the kind who beast you with bats for some spurious tradition… the kind who tip pig’s blood on you at the prom… the kind of kids who are sneering, shark-eyed, vapid, black-hearted, ruthless, religious fanatics who will stamp on your guts to get an inch ahead of you complete with a smile so dazzling that on impact, it looks like a star exploding regardless of the pubes it contains between the impossibly uniform teeth.

I know all of these things because of TV. All television shows that deal with High School are lessons in navigating hate. Hate and morals. Cheerleaders and jocks are all candidates for going postal or, worse still, driving people to murderous revenge on a deserving public. While America continues the war on terror, the real evil sits in wait in the school halls just… grinning.

And so to Glee (E4), the latest pop-culture phenomenon to come from Stateside. Glee looks at the age old USTV favourite of the underdog kicking the behind of the popular kids. And of course, with that, comes The Morals. The constant soul searching and blasted morals.

Of course, we’ve seen it all before… but to chastise Glee for being unoriginal would be pointless. It thrills in the familiar groove, never once looking to be original. That’s fine. Loads of TV does it. However, I can criticise it for being one of the most dreadful things I’ve ever witnessed on a TV set.

The fact is, Glee fancies itself as a musical satire. It isn’t. It isn’t saying anything that you couldn’t make in a generalisation about The American Dream anyway. It’s less satirical than Saved By The Bell. Worse than that, it’s the very thing it aims to poke fun at. Things like this work best when the disaffected and kooky rise against a tide of teeth and brawn. Every single cast member looks like they have just stepped out of a boyband/girlgroup, enforcing the point that you need to be good looking to make it in America meaning that it’s impossible to side with either camp (the camps being ‘The Geeks’ and ‘The Jocks’). That’s not even looking at the racial stereotyping that goes on throughout…

As a result, the show is so devoid of humour and that unquantifiable ‘spunk’ that it’s got less edge than a Bunty annual.

And that’s not even tackling the music. The incidental music in Glee is one of the most irritating things you could ever wish to hear. As it’s all acapella, you end up getting the clawing sensation of being approached by an army of Bobby McFerrin clones all bom-bom-bom doodling versions of familiar tunes as they approach to quirk you to death. There’s even one that sounds like Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ (which is the most terrifying record ever made… click to hear it if you don’t believe me).

When the idiot cast break into spontaneous song, well, it’s the most infuriating noise I’ve heard since Peaches Geldof last opened her mouth. Dead-soul identikit sexless impressions of pop music a la High School Musical. Complete with grinding. The Mr Schuester character takes the biscuit though, proving that he couldn’t beat Ray Slijngaard from 2Unlimited in a rap-battle in the woeful performance of schlock rap hit ‘Gold Digger’ by Kanye West.

Essentially, by the time the music is done with you, you feel like you’ve watched a compilation show made entirely of the songs that feature at the close of every TV Burp. Mix this with the astonishingly bad acting and you’ve got 90210 with tap-dancing shoes on.

The show is so insultingly obvious that you can see plotlines screaming at you from the horizon announcing their arrival weeks before they happen, only to unfurl in a tepid, drippy and grinning way. Imagine Dawson’s Creek: The Musical. It’s like that, only worse.

Now, I imagine that there’s those that will say this show is just throwaway, good time fun… there are those that will probably argue that shows like this are perfect ‘recession TV’… but those people are clearly thicker than words can express. Glee is an epileptic fit wrapped up in a Mickey Mouse blanket.

The show is not high octane enough to be unashamed fun… the show isn’t melodramatic enough to be camp… the show isn’t even trashy enough to be mindless. When you get to the core of a show, quite often, you see the thing that appeals even if you’re not the target audience. When you peel away the layers of Glee there’s nothing there. Nothing at all. It lacks spunk, fun, drama and everything else that makes things of its ilk work. Glee is Bad Girls without the nerve… it’s High School Musical without the courage of conviction… it’s just incredibly poor ideas buffed up like a dog turd you can see your face in.

One saving grace is that Jane Lynch is in it and she’s just great in everything.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what I say. This show will be massive (one million flies ’round crap can’t be wrong). Like a calculated religious cult, Glee is sweeping up the addled minds of the Western World and taking them on a voyage into a vacuum. It’s not so much a TV show, rather, a lesson in branding and marketing. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up being shown on Channel 4 in the next 12 months… that’s when Gleeks will really start to spring out of the ground like gurgling Cabbage Patch Kids who are under the false illusion that they’re unpopular.

Glee: The corpse of pop-culture covered in icing and propped up in a karaoke bar.