It’s All Grady

Forget Edmonds and Lynam, Helen Parton worships at the feet of the true king of Channel 4 afternoons

Growing old in Big Brother Land clearly means getting your bazookas blown up to ridiculous proportions and trying to forget your date of birth among a rabble of gazelle thighed bitches. Fortunately, the real world for the TV viewer (different from reality TV world – gaaah it’s getting too semantically cumbersome) means an increasing fondness for the unislipper, those tea trays with a soft beanbag-style underneath and the Paul O’Grady Show (Channel 4, 5pm).

If any of those things mean anything to you, you are officially PAST IT. I may as well hang up my Hoxton haircut, miniskirt and FMBs, because, whisper it, I love Paul and his pensioner-friendly slice of daily light entertainment. It could be the fact that the host is a gay man and his assistant is a small dog – two demographic groups I delight in spending time with. Or more likely, it’s that my standards for TV have slipped somewhat since I started working from home – anything’s better than Jeremy bloody Kyle, Loose Women or programmes with the words ‘antiques’, ‘attic’, ‘living abroad’ or ‘renovating your house’.

For starters on PO’G there’s the occasional joy of seeing stars involved in something surreally beneath them – today Anthony Head and Juliette Lewis were involved in a Caribbean boogie with some Peckham oldsters. Plus, there’s Paul’s constant allusions to his hellraising past, which for me makes me want to take him down the pub, much as Kate Moss seemed to find Marianne Faithfull endlessly fascinating for a while. And yes, that was a blatant attempt to shoehorn in a similarity between me and Moss, other than our gender, which side of the river we live in and our penchant for skinny indie twats. Anyway Paul, you rock and Richard and Judy will have an act to follow when they return shortly.

And from one Channel 4 institution, I deftly end with some ponderings on another. I refer of course to Big Brother (All Times of the Frickin’ Day If You Insist) - will they introduce a Ceefax page 888-style subtitle service for Mikey’s Scouse mumblings? Is Imogen still in the house? And finally, will Davina reveal a gallows on Friday night for the public hanging of Grace that the British public is so clearly craving? You decide!