If television is not pandering to the fantasies of people wanting a place in the sun or, at least, a new location, it is offering a new skin for them to live in. This is cheap-shot reality viewing and, in some ways, it is TV’s own version of Second Life, the Internet-based virtual community discussed in an earlier blog. Woody Allen once said, Life is hard and then you died and there seems to be a prevailing notion that if you can acquire a swisher house or a more attractive identity, then this, at least, will result in a more interesting journey to the dark abyss.

To meet your Reaper in better shape, according to current lore, you could do a lot worse than metamorphose under the all-seeing eye of a body expert. In brief, if you can’t change the world around you, then change yourself and become a different, more desirable personality in that world. However, this is apparently too difficult to do on your own, even with NLP.

To effect the cure, it appears you must subjugate your essential self to the strict regimes of pseudo-posh women whose beauty-orientations are on a dizzier and more spiritually pure plane than your own. Alternatively, offer yourself passively to strange otherworldly humanoids who, because they prize their own rarefied sexuality above all else, cannot be accused of physical impropriety and are thus able to touch your private parts in the interests of broadening your hosizons and creating a better you. Whichever you choose, dominatrix or camp commandant, these experts will denigrate, ruthlessly, your current body and personality by revealing, under the exacting lens of the camera, all that makes you an abject social dud. Now, suitably deconstructed to an apathetic heap of total irrelevance to humanity, you are perfect for reconstitution into the kind of person who advertises in Soul Mates: “Vibrant tactile female, confident, great shape, wicked sense of humour, looking for partner to take me where none has been before. No hang-ups.”

And off you go. You are no longer you but carry an implant, a retained set of ego-cells from the expert who has rebuilt you in his or her likeness. The road to hell is full of such good retentions.