Oh, oh, Dr O

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Americans are prudes. They are particularly wonky about foreplay and hygiene. At least that is the impression I got after watching The Dr Oz Show, TV3's new weekday Oprah spin-off featuring "renowned heart surgeon" Mehmet Oz.

On one hand, Dr Oz features your standard daytime studio freakshow full of plump menopausal housewives whooping "Oh my God" like a televised hen's night. The script is certainly enough to set you hyperventilating into a brown paper bag: "The shocking truth - puff - brace yourself - puff - protect yourself." So far, same old, same "O", as you'd expect from an Oprah protege. And it really is all about the big O.

The first episode opens with Dr Oz saying he wants them to "have their best sex ever". Dr Oz is quite dishy but this sex story is deeply un-horny. Dr Oz keeps going on about "achieving" orgasm like it's getting a pass in NCEA. With Dr Oz's finger wagging, erotic rapture sounds like something to schedule after a WOF and paying your ACC premium.

"Women are facing a sexual famine. As a doctor I want you to have an orgasm." Cheers, Dr O, but I would have found this wham-bam sexfest easier to accept if it hadn't been followed by other health stories which revealed Americans' bizarre prissiness in all its nose-wrinkling neurosis.

"I've performed CSI on your handbags and you won't believe what I've found." Cue, squealing. "Guess what we found on it?" Dr Oz informs a self-confessed germophobe. "Aureobasidium Pullulans - a fungus that causes asthma." I'm not a doctor but aren't a few bugs helpful to stop you getting allergies? Also, hate to be a spoilsport, but being squeamish about a few bugs on your handbag does not seem compatible with being a femme fatale. Dr Oz quotes the French term for orgasm "petit mort" but I hate to think what the sophisticated French would say about his puritanical attitude to a little bit of dirt.

Variety magazine said Dr Oz feels less like a daytime television show and more like an engaging college lecture. And the guest sex therapist's advice for couples to draw a foreplay map, setting out their favourite erogenous zones, sounded rather hard-headed but eminently sensible. Other tips are borderline OCD. We should be killing bugs on our cellphones with an infra red gizmo, dipping our lipstick in ethyl alcohol before applying it and never ever putting our handbags on the floor. Unless, maybe, you're having your daily orgasm.

* The Dr Oz Show debuts tomorrow on TV3 at 9am and plays weekdays.