Calum Henderson: Has this fat shaming TV personality gone too far?

TV personality and columnist Katie Hopkins stuffs herself to gain 20kg in part one of Katie Hopkins: My Fat Story.

Opinion columnists - have they gone too far?

I mean, Mike Hosking: who does he think he is with his relentless, borderline-psychotic optimism? And that Rachel Smalley: why can't she just leave the poor old patriarchy alone?

Don't even start on Chris Rattue: obviously the man deserves to be bundled into a giant cannon and fired directly into the face of the sun for ever daring to doubt Dan Carter.

But if we think we've got it bad, it's nothing compared to the UK, whose columnists seem locked in a daily battle to get their readers as wound up as possible.

To paraphrase Stewart Lee, who was talking about Jeremy Clarkson, they're either idiots who actually believe all the poorly-researched nonsense they write, or geniuses who have worked out exactly the most accurate ways to annoy everyone.

The reigning queen of tabloid controversy is Katie Hopkins, who gained notoriety as a serial reality television contestant and has since become "Britain's most controversial columnist".

At least, that's how she's billed by The Sun, the paper for whom she writes. Other publications have described her more succinctly as a "professional troll".

In a survey last year - quite possibly also conducted by The Sun - she was voted the UK's second most hated person. First place went to Vladmir Putin.

This year she may well knock him off his loathsome perch.

In the aftermath of a predictably unsympathetic column about the Syrian refugee crisis, a petition was launched proposing she be swapped for 50,000 refugees. It attracted as many signatures in a matter of days.

Basically, Katie Hopkins has a supernatural talent for rarking people up.

She makes our best provocateur, Paul Henry, look like a lowly amateur. She also makes him seem like a member of Mensa by comparison.

In Katie Hopkins: My Fat Story, she goes after the low-hanging fruit of one of her favourite topics: fat people.

The two-part documentary, which screened in the UK at the start of the year, follows her on an ill-conceived quest to gain 20kg in part one, then lose it in part two "to prove how simple it is to lose weight if you really want to."

You don't need to be a sworn member of the PC Brigade to see how this overly simplistic hypothesis won't really prove, well, anything.

Understandably, nobody with a shred of credibility wants anything to do with the stunt, which only adds to Hopkins' sense of martyrdom.

"The health profession is refusing point blank to support her extreme experiment," declares the introductory voice over.

After two weeks of gagging over mouthfuls of burger and donut to the tune of 4000 calories a day, she hasn't gained a gram. She visits the doctor, who diagnoses her as being clinically underweight.

She shoots him daggers across his desk as he reports, "that is an indication that your body and your metabolism is not the same, perhaps, as a person who would eat fewer calories than you and yet put on more weight."

Bugger that for a joke. Metabolism is no excuse for people to stay fat, and it'll be no excuse for Katie Hopkins to stay skinny.

For inspiration, she decides to go to America and gawp disapprovingly at its overweight citizens who dare to eat in public - "and they're not ashamed by it!" She becomes like an appalled, condescending Louis Theroux.

As the experiment wears on, Hopkins' sense of indignant self-pity grows.

It makes her holiday to St Ives a misery. She points out overweight people who have had the audacity to show their faces on the beach, and then at her own slight paunch - "that's how I feel!"

Force-feeding herself another spoonful of ice cream or chocolate cake, she yowls on more than one occasion: "I hate fat people for making me do this!"

But by the time she reaches her weight gain goal - with the help of a "military-style" eating plan enforced by a personal trainer - Hopkins claims to have discovered a newfound empathy for overweight people. "I still wouldn't employ one, but..." she starts. It's quite a superficial empathy.

There's no real hidden depth or meaning to be taken from it - My Fat Story is more or less as moronic and unenlightening as it seems.

As with any troll, professional or otherwise, the best advice is probably to simply ignore Katie Hopkins.

But on the other hand, the teaser for part two promises to show her being so awful that an irate woman reports her to the police, claiming her anti-fat comments constitute a hate crime.

That advice has always proven easier said than done.

Part one of Katie Hopkins: My Fat Story is repeated on TLC at 11.15am on Saturday morning; part two screens on TLC at 9:30pm on Saturday night.