ON "HOLIDAY SHOWDOWN"

Australia is lucky enough to have the new series of the UK reality carcrash Holiday Showdown on our screens at the moment. You know the one - like Wife Swap, but it's holidays, instead of wives, that get swapped. The ITV website describes it in the following dubious terms: “An award-winning ITV1 series that lifts the lid on the vastly different holiday choices that different families make, discovering what happens when one person's idea of holiday heaven is someone else's holiday hell! Two families who have never met before spend two weeks together, one week at each of their dream holiday destinations."

Anyway, last night they did the “shopping-mad” family (their dislikes include: things that are boring, not being able to shop, etc) and the “Mormon” family (they hate drinking, drugs, and, get this, SHOPPING!). The Mormons took the Shopping Family to Salt Lake City, which involved a comedy sequence in which the Mormon mother leapt up to the pulpit of an empty church for the chance to deliver an impromptu sermon of sorts, to the horror of the Shopping Family. This led to the hot boys in the Shopping Family lolling around with no tops on and bitching about the Mormon family.

But the most entertaining part was when the Shopping Family took the Mormon Family to New York City (for a shopping spree-uh), which presented problems for the Mormons on the Sunday, see, because they’re not meant to shop on the Sabbath! The trouble really started when the teenage daughter Mormon (who secretly liked shopping) decided that she couldn’t be arsed going to church with her family, as this would waste valuable shopping time and told her father that she’d be shopping with the Shopping Family instead of praising the baby Jesus. This TERRIBLE SCHISM led to an argument containing teenage Mormon daughter’s delivery of the finest piece of dialogue in the episode.

“I don’t WANT to go to church!” she sulked. “I want to SHOP! Why can’t I just go shopping now and then pray for forgiveness afterwards?”

Clearly, the girl has been reading Dreadnought.