Celebrity Wife Swap Channel 4 , 8pm Persuasion ITV1, 9pm Doctor Who BBC1, 7pm (Saturday) IT IS a two-part conundrum to tax the finest philosophical minds: who wins when you exchange Vanessa Feltz (loud, overbearing, professionally irksome) for Debbie McGee (fluffy, wittering, brittle, pointless)?
And who benefits from transposing Debbie's grumpy and fossilised hubby, Paul Daniels, with a hunky young dude - Vanessa Feltz's current fiance - who, in 1999, provided the vocals on Turn Around, a so-so dance track, and is still trying to derive fame and profit from this fleeting brush with the charts eight years later?
The answer to each question is surprising, as well as being the same in both cases: we viewers won a minor victory in that Celebrity Wife Swap wasn't a complete waste of our time.
In the show's biggest surprise, morose magician and curmudgeonly conjurer Paul Daniels emerged as an insightful diviner of his fellow man's pain (yes, yes, he's a hidebound, tight-lipped and miserable old gnome, too). You certainly couldn't help but agree with Paul's analysis of Vanessa, between whom a few days' froideur had passed.
"She's working at being young," said Paul, having distastefully observed Vanessa's strange compulsive flirting and relentless sexy badinage-making with men, first in his drab local pub, then in a swish nightclub.
As Paul continued: "A lot of the time I'm not sure I shouldn't feel sorry for Vanessa. She feels she's missing something."
You couldn't miss the fact that Vanessa - surprise No2 - is rather more palatable when she doesn't feel the need to perform in public. For, when Vanessa's not wiggling her wobblies at random men or cruelly opinionating at an audience on her mid-morning BBC London radio show, she's quite sweet, and evidently insecure.
Heck, why else would a 44-year-old woman troll around in a T-shirt that says "Fiancee" on the front?
As for Vanessa's 33-year-old other half, Ben Ofoedu, ya hafta admire the showbiz bottle of a geezer who, with a straight face, insists that he's labouring solidly to advance his career by lying around his high-profile partner's house all day while she's out at work and then parading her round nightclubs to draw media attention to his performances of a lame one-song karaoke routine.
This imbalance was noted by Debbie, who stated: "She's trying to change her lifestyle to fit her feller... why? It's not a good basis for a relationship."
Vanessa defended Ben in motherly fashion. What did she get in return, the poor daft trout? Ben defiling all our ears with a sickeningly maudlin, near tune-free love-song he's written and recorded about Vanessa for their wedding. Don't do it, chucks - the song or the wedding.
As for Debbie, she also wore a T-shirt with a twee slogan: "Not Only Am I Perfect, But I'm Blonde, Too." This said rather too much about Debbie.
Persuasion was rather stolen away from its romantic lead, Anne Elliot. Sally Hawkins portrayed her as a less twitchy Hayley Cropper in floatier skirts. So, it was Anthony Head, as Anne's spendthrift fop of a father, Sir Walter, who commanded all eyes.
Sometimes Anthony sneered; sometimes he looked as though he'd just sucked a lemon. Occasionally his pursed lips evoked a cat in retreat, its tail aloft.
Plus you can't go wrong languidly uttering lines such as, "Navy men all look terribly knocked about - they are exposed to wind and weather till they're not fit to be seen".
Doctor Who's new sidekick, Martha Jones, had one telling line when the Doc dared her to stroll beside him on the moon, warning her: "We might die."
"We might not," she spat. Freeman Agyeman's no Billie Piper, but she might prove tolerably feisty.
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