Party Animals

Forget House of Cards, this is Maison de Merde. The first episode of Party Animals, broadcast on Wednesday but caught fashionably late by myself due to cocaine-snorting-off-the-backs-of-female-lobbyist commitments, is truly dreadful.

Tibor Fischer famously wrote of Amis' Yellow Dog: "It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." Party Animals, on the other hand, is like your errant brother being caught defecating on the London Underground. You didn't have high expectations in the first place but the idea that people might associate such embarrassing behaviour with your own way of life is strangely unsettling...

The highlight of the first episode must surely have been when Posh Blonde Journo (PBJ) engages in shengagians with Gormless Lobbyist. As they get down to business, PBJ, in a manner which should be breathless but instead oozes all the sexuality of a train platform announcement, utters a line claiming how great it is to shag someone "below's one's social class!"

Such searing indictment of the Westminster Village aside, Party Animals really doesn't have anything to recommend it. Will I be watching the second episode? Of course I will! Then I can sit there wallowing in Parliamentary anorakism, shouting at the screen "That's ridiculous! Don't they know OPQs have to be tabled two days advance.."