WITH so many "I want to be famous" competitions being decided in the last seven days - from Stars In Their Eyes to Masterchef and The Games - it has been the more infamous exploits in Blame The Parents (BBC1, Thursday) which have captured my family's attention.

While you could look at this as another exploitative fly-on-the-wall documentary, there is at least an insight into how Britain's PC-peppered society is trying to stop unruly teenagers becoming tomorrow's hardened criminals.

The signs from Southampton's parenting course aren't good. The four-parter finished this week with two sets of the eight parents featured no longer together, another having left the course and the one remaining pair, Sue and Richard, at loggerheads about how to stop teenage son Lewis attacking them physically.

"How can people swear at each other like this," said my wife in amazement as the all-star show of Reg and Jenny and eldest daughter Jennifer held centre stage.

Parenting facilitator (whatever one of those is) Islay Downey encouraged Reg and Jenny to stand up to Jennifer as a unit.

The closing shots were of Reg sitting forlornly alone on some wasteground while his wife prattled thoughtlessly about giving in to her daughter's violence, swearing and smoking as "anything for an easy life". Jennifer is now in trouble with the police.

I spent the same night turning our conservatory into a "white room" with massive decorating plastic and paper sheets for my youngest son's latest art course extravaganza.

Our two cats, who share the space, were delighted in terms of finding new territory to christen and my wife was horrified as carefully-taped ceiling paper began to shrink and unpeel in the new sweaty atmosphere. "Why can't his projects be small and economic?" she cried, without a single swear word.

Any hopes I had of distracting her with a taped version of Ikea Drives Me Crazy (BBC2, Easter Monday) proved as fruitless as expecting one of the Swedish store's flatpack creations to fit together first time.

"What the hell is this, have they gone off their heads," she announced as we quickly witnessed a Nordic nutter, clutching an electric guitar, serenading us with the Ikea anthem from one store's car park roundabout.

Following the fracas over cut-price futons at Ikea's flagship Edmonton store, producer and single mum Nicky Taylor featured herself and three children going off in search of a new bed for son Harry.

She only needed the cigarettes and paint-blistering vocabulary to be included as part of Blame The Parents as viewers suffered a witless and, quite frankly, fairly insulting assault on their intelligence.

About the only fact worth revealing is that Ikea's massively wealthy boss Ingvar Kamprad was once a Nazi sympathiser, although the programme opted to demonstrate this using Swedish flags invading Europe a la the opening titles of Dad's Army.

There has to a time when the wheels come off this cheap chic revolution "just as they have on the chair we've just bought for our computer", as my wife observed.

However, some children appear to enjoy this shopping experience and we all know that the average 12-year-old can be trusted to put together an Ikea creation. Is that why they swear and smoke at 14?

Published: 02/04/2005