Louis Walsh

E4's rollicking sci-fi series is a warning to potential Asbo candidates. Do the crime, do the time; in the Misfits' case, 200 hours' community service, dressed in jumpsuits from the Guantanamo Bay branch of B&Q. Cleaning graffiti off walls is a doddle when there are murderous probation officers, naked men and chippy chav Kelly - aka Catherine Tate's Lauren Cooper - to contend with. Caught in a supernatural storm, the teenage tag team were endowed with phenomenal powers. Tonight, Alisha has fun abusing hers while invisible Simon's online relationship with Shygirl18 blossoms. And what power was bestowed on Nathan, the love child of Craggy Island's Mrs Doyle and Simon Amstell? Lycanthropy? Or the power to be the most annoying Irish gobs**** since Louis Walsh?

Meeshell is a girl of our times. Obsessed by fame, convinced she's a dead good singer, she'll do anything to bag a No.1 single and a celebrity footballer boyfriend because 'they even smell famous'. And if this entails dumping your best friend and your boyfriend in front of an 8 million-strong TV audience, then so be it.

Welcome to Mouth To Mouth, a modern amorality tale that deconstructs the X Factor generation through a sextet of comic monologues told straight to camera. Subtle it isn't - Meeshell is a character only just this side of Catherine Tate caricature - but this bitter little drama of dreams dashed and friendships betrayed on the potholed road to talent-show glory makes a nifty companion piece to the ongoing travails of Jedward, Stacey, Joe and the rest.

Writer Karl Minns has littered his script with knowing pop references (Meshell on boyfriend Tyler: 'We're like the Ting Tings - he presses all the buttons at the back and I get all the glory') and it's that sharp voice that gives Mouth To Mouth its pout. Meeshell may seem like a typical airhead but behind the pink fluff there's a soul of steel. Slacker Tyler looks for all the world a loser but he's not above a kiss-and-tell when the price is right.

Whether Mouth To Mouth's concept can stand four more episodes - the same tale spun out through the eyes of all the players - remains to be seen. But I'm hopeful of seeing a snatch of Fame Search, the show that propelled Meeshell to her YouTube moment of loved-one dumping fame. 'A girl group won,' our heroine noted bitterly. 'One lezza, one bi, one straight. Called Threeway. Bit gimmicky.' Louis Walsh is on the phone already.

There's the pleasure of watching television, and then there's the enhanced pleasure of watching television through the lunatic, bespectacled eyes of Harry Hill, the doctor-turned-comedian who returns for the ninth series of his quickfire lampooning of the week's TV idiocies and inanities. With his ear-brushingly high collars, his line of pens emblazoning his breast pocket and his silly schoolboy's dribble of badges on his lapel, Hill has always looked like a ventriloquist's dummy that somebody forgot to put the wig on. You probably wouldn't want him as your GP. But as a palliative to the surreal absurdities thrown up by television each week, Hill is welcome medicine. His early potshots will almost certainly include skewering studies of the revealing minor moments in The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing that you may have missed the first time round. Who but Hill would identify, for instance, the garish range of facial expressions employed by Louis Walsh on the judging panel of The X Factor or the tongue-lolling, puppy-dog mug of contestant Eoghan Quigg begging you to vote for him? For a weekly post mortem of TV's lesser-spotted manias and neuroses, Hill may be just what the doctor ordered.

The dead-fly garnish on this week's bucket of swill was Anonymous, the new celebrity prank-show on ITV1.

"What happens when celebrities want a day off?" the introduction ran - to the immediate, incredulous answer from the viewer, "Take the day off?"

But this was not the full question Anonymous was asking. The full inquiry was, "What happens when celebrities want a day off - and cause havoc with dozens of cameras, ingeniously hidden from view?"

Well then, in that case, the answer is obviously, "Fill up 45 minutes of prime-time on a Saturday night and, technically, not really have a day off at all."

The "killer" idea of Anonymous is that it gives celebrities "the biggest makeover - a new face". Thanks to a much-mentioned "five hours in prosthetics", Fiz from Coronation Street got rigged up as a blonde Essex girl, the X Factor judge Louis Walsh got disguised as an old man, and the former rugby player Matt Dawson was transformed into a camp West End choreographer. Thus disguised, the celebrities then pranked their celebrity friends - usually by behaving with intolerable wackiness, while their friends acted with bemused good grace.

The essential problem with Anonymous - and it became obvious in minutes - was the disguises themselves. While the stars certainly weren't recognisable as themselves, they also weren't necessarily recognisable as normal human beings, either. Frankly, those prosthetics were poor. Fiz's chin looked like it was constructed of three pieces of pre-sliced turkey breast. Matt Dawson's face had the alarming unyieldingness of a Bakelite death mask and Louis Walsh looked like a statue of Freddie Boswell from Bread, as sculpted by the blind woman in the video to Hello. Even in a post-Simon Weston world, you would momentarily break stride on sighting them in the street. And in every single prank, the victims commented on how alarmingly awful the prankers' prosthetics were.

"As soon as I saw him, I thought, 'He's had loads of plastic surgery,'" Austin Healey said of Dawson's wonky-Spam head.

"I just thought you'd had really bad plastic surgery!" Fiz's Corrie colleague Michelle Keegan howled at Fiz, who looked like Nikki Chapman wearing Craig David's Bo' Selecta! chin.

You do have to wonder if the muchvaunted Anonymous "Four hours in prosthetics!" is strictly necessary. After all, Jeremy Beadle regularly managed to get people's houses knocked down while wearing disguises no more audacious than "a hat".