"I CAN'T bear to look at myself on the TV," said the world's ugliest man. Who can?

Plumbing new depths of pointlessness, ITV's Sadly, This Is David Gest swiftly established itself as the worst programme of the year. OK, I made up the "Sadly" bit.

But how many times can a guy say "Holy Focaccia" before it ceases to be funny? Once.

Minutes into the first instalment of our hero's staged fly-on-the-wall-to-wall-boredom series, the message was clear: Come in Mr Gest... your time is up! Setting up home at London's Grosvenor Hotel, David was "determined to cash in on his UK fame while he's still hot property".

In another wild over-estimation of his popularity, the I'm A Celebrity weirdo declared: "Why not stay where you're loved?" Where would that be?

Toe-curling tedium followed with a succession of excruciatingly contrived set pieces: Mockney Dave hitting the streets in the misguided belief that Londoners just love dumb Yanks doing irritatingly bad impressions of them.

In-demand Dave in a Pearly King suit pretending he's landed a lucrative ad campaign - when all he's doing is publicity pictures to promote his own lousy show.

Friend of the stars Dave meeting Beyonce. Briefly.

Dave's jungle chum Matt Willis hosting the "sell-out" David Gest Soul Spectacular in a half-empty church hall. God help us!

To see how this type of show should be done, tune into ITV2's superior Katie and Peter: The Next Chapter. Happy to turn their bizarre lives into a TV soap, Jordan and Peter Andre just act naturally. The result is a compelling explosion of fabulously bad taste and disgusting behaviour.

Gest tries desperately to play the eccentric. But he's a self-conscious, middleclass boy from the US suburbs. And it shows.

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AT the end of series two of the Beeb's desperate-to-be groovy school for scandal saga Waterloo Road what have we learned? This important equation: Classrooms + Kasabian = crap.

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GREAT to see public school-loving Labour MP Diane Abbott learning to play the piano on the Beeb's virtually unwatched Play It Again. She should have stuck to what she's really good at... blowing her own trumpet