Keeping abreast of Hugh's floozies

By GREG DIXON

First question: Who Wants To Be A Playboy Playmate?

Second question: For god's sake, is this really how far we've come?

Apparently so, as TV2 - no doubt emptying the bottom of the barrel before it must comply with the Government's charter - serves up what must be, despite heated competition, the nadir of the Popstars talent quest genre.

In fact it's hardly a talent contest. Who Wants To Be A Playboy Playmate? (TV2, 8.30pm) is more an extended perv session for those, on screen and off, who like eyeing a bit of flesh.

Chosen from thousands in a nationwide search, 12 American women compete through photo sessions to be Miss July 2002 in the world's oldest girlie mag, and this inevitably means they have to peel down to, well, not to nothing, not on television anyway.

There is plenty of flesh but no nudity here. Just like that opening sequence in Austin Powers' The Spy Who Shagged Me, the nude photo shoots shown tonight feature a variety of objects getting in the way of the naughty bits. This counts as the only tasteful thing that happens during the show's two hours.

Decisions, decisions. Upon viewing the flesh on offer, Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, who looks, like some porno-Lazarus, to have risen from the dead (perhaps it was the Viagra), makes the call on who stays and who goes.

Hef treats the decision-making process like he's attending a UN Security council session on whether Iraq should be bombed back to the Stone Age.

He frowns. He broods.

He says things like "I like the schoolgirl."

It is, as it inevitably is with these things, all very tedious as they whittle 10 down to one over 12 days.

When clothed, the "girls" moan and bitch a lot as they lounge around between photo shoots in their digs across the road from the Playboy mansion. This might be moderately amusing if it didn't go on for what feels like millennia.

There are a few laughs, however, mostly from the biggest moaner of them all, Lauren, who's all natural and resents the fakers in the contest.

"Why has it come to this," she bleats into the phone, "where you have to be fake to look good?"

Irony, it appears, is not a concept this wannabe playmate is familiar with.

Another (I assume) unintentionally funny scene is where a few of the contestants sit around bragging about how many beauty contests they've been in and where they were placed. But mostly this is like watching the judges taking forever to decide "best filly in show" at the local A&P.

Last question: What next? Who Wants Be A Porno Star? Who Wants To Be A Terrorist? Who Wants To Be George W. Bush?