Derek's Bloody Dreams

Friday nights, BBCNI

Natalie Cassidy's Diet Secrets, BBC3

It's not often I agree with letters in the paper. Not the North Belfast News of course – we have quite a sensible readership in this neck of the woods – but the likes of the Tele, Irish News and their ilk. If the letters aren't from some mad religious type quoting three pages of the Bible, then they're listing every historical event from year dot as justification of why we should/should not accept/deny some new skulduggery from Stormont. It gets tedious. 

 Not so last week, as some goggleboxer wrote in, in wrath and enraged at BBCNI's output on weekend nights. No, it wasn't me, really. If BBCNI want to make and put on "local" programmes, the infuriated goggleboxer pointed out, fair enough. But show them on a bally weekday night or at some other time, rather than prime time on a Friday night.

This has long been a touchy subject of mine. Here be's me, having a nice quiet Friday night in, ready at 9 or 10pm to sit down and watch something decent. Something that other people were allowed to watch. But what would we get in Norn Iron? Give My Head Peace. Good Dog Bad Dog. Stephen Nolan on TV in Panic Attack, as if he's not annoying and obnoxious enough on the radio. 

Excuse me, but I'm going to shout here – WE DON'T WANT TO SEE LOCAL CRAP ON THE TELLY AT WEEKENDS. Or indeed, any other time. If you must make boring, cringeworthy, tedious crap like Derek's Dreams, show it at 2pm on BBC2 on a Sunday when sensible types will either be just crawling out from under their hangovers, or settling down to watch Easties. Grr.

More grr with Natalie Cassidy's Diet Secrets (BBC3), yet another programme looking at fad diets and the skinny celebrity craze. I started watching this all sympathetic towards Natalie – as Sonia in Eastenders she grew up (and outwards) in the most public way possible, but as the programme went on I started to see it as less an opportunity to explore the prevalence of fad diets and skinny culture on young women today, and more of an opportunity to explore, er, Natalie. 

Natalie went on the maple syrup diet – having only maple syrup to the tune of only 360 calories a day; the cabbage soup diet – self-explanatory, and makes you fart; and the fingernail diet – eating a fingernail portion of food every 14 minutes (who the hell makes these up?). After days of starvation and heart palpitations, she came to the conclusion that fad diets are Bad. Thanks Natalie.

She lost her own four stone by eating healthily and exercising, and fair play to her too. But, in a programme where she derides the magazines like Heat and Closer for obsessing about women's weight and promoting crazy diets (sniff a grapefruit before eating was one memorable piece of advice), she was also buying them. She railed against the diet industry's feeding of myths to women, yet presented her own statement as fact – fad diets make you fat. There is proof that they do, but the way she went up to a group of young women on the street and proclaimed this as gospel, without offering any facts to back it up, shows both that she is a poor documentary maker and that many young women will swallow anything about the diet industry. As long as it doesn't have too many calories, that is. 

She got one thing right though – even if was more by chance than anything else – the extreme skinniness culture has become much more pervasive in the past five years or so. Look at the women in Friends – going from slim in the first few series to genuinely emaciated in the last. Will the bubble burst? Natalie wonders, concluding that it won't, because "people are too into reading about this". Well, stop buying the bloody magazines then, Natalie.

I hence declare a boycott. Not that I read Heat and the like – I do like reading brain mush, but prefer Take a Break and Enid Blyton – but I am watching no more stupid diet programmes, 10 Years Younger, You Are What You Eat or any other sort of nonsense like it. Enough. Maybe I should go back on the drink.