The Sloppy Dog's Worst of 2006: TV

Right, time for some full-on seasonal bitterness. Come with us, dear readers, on a journey across television's rotting, reeking wastelands...

10. Boys Will Be Girls
It would be easy to stumble into a cliché along the lines of how this sounded like a good idea, but let’s call a spade a spade – a girl band assembled from the carcasses of obsolete boy bands is one of the worst ideas in the history of the small screen. They should have hedged their bets when a member of bloody VS made his excuses at the last minute – when the undernourished, flea-riddled rodents jump ship, you know it’s time to lower the lifeboats.

9 & 8. Top of the Pops and CD:UK
It actually saddens us to include two once-great shows in our hallowed list o’ shite. The world’s finest and longest-serving music show, and its cheeky, fresh, pretender-to-the-crown that became an iconic pop institution in its own right. However, both went to the great digibeta recycling facility in the sky when the respective production teams failed to generate a lone original idea between them or know a single thing about current music. Rather than bow out with dignity, both CD:UK and Top of the Pops ended on the lowest, trumpeting wet fart of a note conceivable.

7. Eastenders
Admittedly, not a show we’ve seen a great deal of this year, yet the few occasions we’ve been exposed have had a devastating effect, not unlike that topical radiation stuff we can’t recall the name of. Dire scripts, long departed characters continuously playing the bad penny... but the ultimate shark-jump comes via the downward spiral of Pauline Fowler, from barrow-forged matriarch to grousing fishwife to sinister over-matured fraudster. Next stop, sexual deviation, crack addiction, wiccan dabblings and cannibalism.

6. The Jeremy Kyle Show
We adore the Tittybangbang sketch featuring the pramface sea-monster desperate to appear on Jeremy Kyle – speaks volumes about the calibre of guest and presumably the viewers. Essentially a platform for an arrogant, condescending tosspot to candidly shit upon humanity (a social group which he apparently transcends), never has one man prompted use of the word “cunt” from so many people. The modern-day equivalent of a public hanging, though the one person with the noose around his neck should be Kyle himself. Cunt. (See?!)

5. Unanimous
Perhaps if we had an explanation of how this format actually works, we wouldn’t resent it so much. Is it a reality show? Is it a quiz show? How exactly do they win the money? Why the hell can’t they just split it and be done with it? Who’s the all-knowing Zordon-like guy in the monitor? Have Endemol fucked up once again? Do we actually give a flying fuck?

4. All You've Got
MTV’s atrocious tale of high school volleyball team rivalry genuinely displayed some of the worst acting and dialogue we’ve seen in years. Believe us when we say you haven’t seen bad television until you’ve witnessed All You’ve Got’s horrendous training montage, which not only ticks every high school movie cliché imaginable, but features the Hail Mary being recited over 1 2 Step. Seriously.

3 & 2. Hollyoaks and Hollyoaks In The City
Another tie in our list, these twin-headed trolls of Merseyside, massacre and masturbation continue to plummet to new depths. As if the low-rent, gauche, desperate teatime show wasn’t making us throw up in our mouths enough, we’ve cruelly been bestowed with a late night spin-off (namely the above with the odd tit and tenuously-uttered F-words). Starring the finest offal of the acting world, including professional undresser Philip Olivier, and Grim Kym Marsh ‘playing’ a discounted prostitute, it’s time one of those perennial budget-busting explosions wiped this God-awful franchise off the screens for good. Still, it’s always intriguing to see how many cup sizes Gemma Atkinson has increased by since her previous scene.

1. The Frosties ad
While not actually a TV show, it’s been head and shoulders above its nearest rivals the single worst thing to pollute a television set throughout 2006. The song that refuses to vacate your internal jukebox for a month after just one listen, the grave mistake of confusing “bowl” for “plate”, the wildly-flailing arms atop the cherry-picker that you so desperately yearn to malfunction and send the little twat into orbit... if this alone didn’t send sales of advert-skipping hard drive recorders through the roof, nothing will. “They’re gonna taste great”, you say? After this devastating cesspit, we can’t imagine Frosties to taste like anything other than a compound of mud, earwax and PURE EVIL.