CLOTHES DOWN THIS SOLE-LESS SHOW; Fashion frauds.

They are creations so vulgar they have to be ditched every few months.

High fashion. You know the game: Balding men with pony tails hire beanpoles to strut down catwalks with metal cylinders coming out of their flat chests and wire microwaves on their head.

No one buys the costume. But the designer's name is beamed around the globe ensuring a multi-million pound plug for his latest perfume.

Women worry themselves thinner. The designers gorge themselves fatter.

An elitist industry riddled with snobbery and populated by empty pouting faces fronting empty, pouting minds.

And that's just some of the TV presenters. Clothes Show host Jeff Banks, or Smarm at C&A, as he's known in the trade, was bad enough.

Sophie Anderton, the presenter of the latest fashion show, Desire, is far worse - a snooty Sloane who thinks the world begins and ends in a Knightsbridge changing room.

I watched it because I needed a new jumper. At the end I needed a sedative.

My nerves were shot at the sight of a billionaire's wife, who spends pounds 30,000 on a frock, wears it once, then goes for another fitting.

At interviews with designers who said they weren't making clothes but statements. (And so they should be - to the Fraud Squad.)

There were privileged lumps with Old Testament names who spoke of the horrendous dilemma of deciding which pounds 2,000 peach marquee they should be lowered into for the Debutantes' Ball.

But this pointless piece of television was summed up by shoe-designer Johnny Moke, who said he was repulsed at the cheap, ugly shoes worn by the majority of British people.

"You don't have to spend that much to get a decent hand-sewn pair. You can get them for pounds 100."

It hit at the heart of this sad, incestuous little world called fashion, populated by a shower of poseurs unaware that most people outside their circle wear cheap shoes because they're literally on their uppers.

A fate I firmly predict will soon befall everyone involved in Desire when the Trades Descriptions people realise it is a fashion show made by Planet 24.

The owner? Bob Geldof.

Flawed .. but I

love playing Beck the tape

Beck is riddled with flaws. It has a hackneyed title from The Lovejoy/Morse/Taggart School Of Lost Christian Names.

It has the token Irish/black/northern characters from the School Of Paranoid Right-On London Producers.

And then there is appallingly gratuitous nipple-showing from that wanton sex machine, Amanda Redman (right).

A raunchy siren who struts around in leather skirt, jacket and gloves, demolishing vodka and food with a passion before laying into her man with a vengeance.

I just can't work out why I seem to have watched the first two episodes 14 times on video, screwing up my freeze-frame in the process.

Jo Brand was on top form in A Big Slice Of Jo Brand with marvellous advice not just for the royals, but for the sanity of everyone forced to sit through Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman.

"Prince Charles should take a note out of Henry VIII's book. Marry Jane Seymour, then cut her f****** head off. She's a crap actress and that Le Jardin smells of cat-pee.''

Don't scoff, fat is

fabulous

Two Fat Ladies are brilliant eccentrics who make for brilliant television.

Finally we have a food show where the cooks love their scoff. Every fat- ridden, oily calorie of it.

Pushed two feet away from the stove by their gargantuan stomachs, they larded their monkfish, mouths salivating and their throats giving a genuine cry of pleasure from the depths of their ample guts.

What a change from seeing an anorexic Gary Rhodes in the kitchen, one hand on a tube of gel and staring at his reflection in the pan.

These women have all it takes to become a huge pair of cults: the chins of Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, the voice of Margaret Rutherford and the gait of Sir Nicholas Scott after a few pain-killers and a crate of cooking sherry.

DEATHLY DENNIS LOOKS FAR FROM ALRIGHT

On It'll Be Alright On The Night's Cock-Up Trip, that out-take- in-waiting, Dennis Norden, was transported to a place called Great Cockup, where he sat looking more like his Spitting Image puppet than the puppet itself.

Apparently, they filmed it on Great Cockup as they felt it was a location that best summed up the feel of the show. Next time they should book Deadman's Green in Staffordshire. As Dennis Norden is now Death propped up by a clipboard.

To celebrate its 100th draw, The National Lottery Live gave us a list of the causes the lotto has raised money for.

They left out the biggest benefactor.

Mystic Meg claims words appear in her mind - words like "A policeman," "The letter G" and "Good news for a Libran."

The only words she really sees are "money," "for" and "old rope."

It's O'Toole and O'Drool

Chris Evans excelled himself in the Ginger grovelling stakes on TFI Friday when he asked us to worship at the feet of actor Peter O'Toole.

He called O'Toole a "God," shamelessly plugged his new book every 30 seconds, and came up with an analogy to remind his young audience who this ageing, reformed drunkard was.

"In the world of entertainment I am this (cue a shot of a fizzled-out firework) while Mr O'Toole is this (cue an atomic bomb)."

From where I was sitting Chris, you were a tongue and Mr O'Toole was a bottom.

In the spell-binding EastEnders poor old Cindy turned to Barry Evans for help, weeping uncontrollably about being abandoned: "What David's giving up," said Bazza, slipping an arm around The Whore From Hell, "a million blokes would give their right arm for."

Hmm. Unless you're her husband, when you have to give up half your stomach.