KEY POINTS:
I still haven't figured out the rules for Who Wants to Be a Bum? Which is what Filthy Rich and Homeless (TV One, last night, 9.30) ought to be called.
Does the filthy rich lister who is best at being a bum win? Or lose? And how
do you define the best bum? The one who cheats the most, thus being best at surviving being homeless in London?
If you can make money on the streets (nobody has yet tried to do this in the time-honoured way of snatching a handbag), do you win? Or would that prove that you are too clever to be a successful bum?
The premise is this: six rich people have to be bums for 10 days. The only wannabe girl bum, Clementine, a horsey girl whose dad is a famous telly news reader, turns up with a Louis Vuitton bag. This is taken off her, although not by a bum. The silly bint.
But hang on a minute. If the "point" of this The Apprentice Bum is that every one of us is only a trust fund collapse away from having to live on the streets, it might just be conceivable that we could be seeing bums with It bags on the streets.
I'm as hazy about the point of this as I am about the rules. Clementine seems to have broken most of the rules already. She decided the telly folk had compromised her safety - bums are covered by OSH? - by dropping her off at night in Soho. So, they having broken the rules, she would too. She waited outside a telly studio for an old family friend who let her have a wash in her dressing room and gave her 20 quid.
I admit that it's unlikely a bum person would have a family friend who is famous for being on the telly but you never know, do you? And if, say, Mr Paul Henry should ever find himself on the streets after a collapse in the cornflake market it is just possible that he could turn up outside Mr Oliver Driver's studio and be let in and given 20c.
That's just being silly. But this is a very silly programme. It is supposed to make us think about what it would be like to be homeless and, so, presumably, to encourage empathy towards those who are. All it made me do was think about which of Auckland's filthy rich I wouldn't give 20c to if I saw them begging with an empty espresso cup.
It didn't help that I took against one of the couple who are the bum wranglers, an earnest pair, Rebecca and Craig, who are no doubt in this for earnest reasons. Rebecca is a black American who has run programmes in the States where students live on the streets "to learn about poverty the hard way". Is there any easy way? I suppose that would be called giving to charity.
Rebecca would drive me to the streets to get away from her. She talks about the "journey". What journey? How is becoming homeless, even if you're just playing at it, a journey? Darren was on a journey. He phoned his mum (against the rules because, presumably, bums don't ever have mums who might take a phone call from their bum sons) to tell her how awful it was and to report on the state of his underwear.
Rebecca took Clementine's sleeping bag away as punishment for taking the 20 quid. I want to hear her say: "We have ways of making you homeless."
I'd pay a dollar for that.