Jane Vincent comes strutting onscreen to strains of angelic music, her sturdy legs clad in lacy tights and her lips gummy with tangerine lipstick.

So this is a comedy? The programme's title suggested otherwise, being called The Job Centre (C4), implying we'd be having a secret, behind-the-scenes documentary about how Iain Duncan Smith is pressuring the staff to impose their notorious, illogical sanctions which are pushing the sick into suicide. That would be an invaluable, essential programme but unfortunately that's not what we have here, so the first thing we experience on watching this programme is disappointment.

This is a new series and it's a documentary about Jane Vincent's recruitment agency. Based in Bradford, a city of deprivation and high unemployment, she and her team of consultants smile, chirp and chatter as a trail of unfortunates come slumping through the glassy doors looking for work.

Jane runs a recruitment agency so they don't really care if you're suited to the vacancies they have on offer. They just want to push you at an employer in the hope they'll take you on which means the agency can claim their fee and Jane can say something annoying, like 'yay' or 'woo-hoo!'

Because if they truly cared about forging careers, and finding satisfying work for their candidates, they would offer them genuine advice and assistance. They'd politely but firmly tell the jobseekers to take the damn baseball cap and grubby tracksuit off. They'd ask them to sit up straight and to have a shower. It might sound rather puritanical, but who is going to offer a job to these people in the current dishevelled state? 

Perhaps I'm being harsh on the agency. Some candidates smelled of cannabis and urine and they were indeed told that this won't make a good impression, but the basics like sitting up straight and looking smart were ignored: just take this scruffy person for a week or two so we can claim our fee! That seemed to be the philosophy. It was simply about slotting people into jobs. There was no thought given as to whether the person and the job are suited. The unemployed person just forms part of an ugly triangle of money-grabbing: a business needs cheap labour and the agency needs a commission so the candidate is pushed from one point to the other.

But why were so many people attending interviews looking, and smelling, like death? Were there mental heath problems involved? Do tell us, Jane Vincent and co. But they told us nothing. Instead, we got loud, irritating Jane pulling gargoyle faces, introducing us to her team of dullards and giggling at how one of them, a former air steward, joined the Mile High Club. There were plenty of laughs, innuendo and banter, but no probing at the deeper issues. There was no wondering why a desperate person, in long-term unemployment, would turn up for an interview in a baseball cap, or reeking of urine. These disturbing issues were not even referred to. The malodorous candidates were gently chided, and some had to be driven to work by the agency as they were incapable of getting there on time, but it was never asked why they were in such a poor physical (and mental?) state.

It also didn't occur to Jane and her staff that unemployment, and the need to scrabble for call centre and factory jobs, is no laughing matter and so Jane's 'bubbly' personality and her silly staff were jarring and patronising. There was an opportunity here for a crusading, tough or maybe blackly humorous programme, and Channel 4 have missed it entirely and given us lazy office giggles. Worse than that, however, is that The Job Centre is simply another example of what's now called 'poverty porn'. They're showing us the unemployed as people who reek of urine and drugs, who shamble in a haze of smoke and body odour and who can't be bothered turning up to work on time. Just as with Benefits Street, they're showing the most hideous examples of the group but shoving them into the spotlight as though they represent the whole.