Greg Dixon: The Devil take that infernal reality

Self-improvement is the Devil's work. And it's at this time of year that many - weakened by seasonal guts, over-full ashtrays and the fear of spending another year in the same rubbish job - fall under Lucifer's curse.

Promises are made, part-time courses in aromatherapy signed up for, gyms joined and fags put away for long minutes at a time.

But the Prince of Darkness is merely toying with us, the swine. As soon as we've unshackled ourselves from one bad habit, he finds a worse deal for us to sign.

In much the same way television takes off the bad stuff at this time of year - only to foist on us the really, really bad stuff.

I've tried not to watch, really I have. Unfortunately for us all, summer was held for two hours on the afternoon of November 4, so I've ended up sitting in front of the damned thing anyway. With New Year's gone, television's festive horror show should have passed by now, as December's winter has now passed into January's autumn.

Well, it hasn't passed. And you'd have thought that, having gorged itself on the usual junk food diet of Christmas specials, Christmas movies, Christmas sing-a-longs and Christmas messages, television would be considering a little self-improvement.

Well, it has. I just didn't expect it to take quite the butt-ugly shape of TV2's Quest For Success. This bottom-end reality show - a sort of Mucking In for the hopeless of mind rather than of garden - has minor celebrities, business and sports people mucking in with self-help cliches (helpfully, for the really hopeless, these are run as onscreen captions) to assist an Average Joe or Josephine reach a goal such as joining the coppers.

Last week's first episode starred Allison Roe. I think she was a runner. Anyway, she, as the narration put it, was going to "help a defeated woman find the confidence to marry the man she loves". What this boiled down to was helping said woman lose 20kg by her wedding day by stopping her eating six eggs and six sausages a day.

This week, the show starred Susan Devoy. She used to be in some squash racket. She, as the voiceover put it, was going "to inspire a young mum to overcome her dread of criticism to achieve her dream to publish her own self-help book". This boiled down to Devoy sending the woman's manuscript to a publisher.

What a combination: overblown narration, dreary filming and stories so dull you want to kill yourself. The best thing you can say about it is at least this television self-improvement doesn't involve violent, expensive surgery or Donald Trump. But it is quite the most awful piece of television I have seen this year.

It is, obviously, early days for this year, but I'm betting (yes, I've failed to give that up, too) it will still be on my list at the end of the year. Meanwhile, I await television to get with the Devil and to get serious about improving itself this year.