A word of warning: I went to the dentist’s a few hours ago, and as a result my head is the size of a watermelon and it feels like a family of rats is gnawing a nice warm burrow in my lower jaw. Therefore, I’m not in the best of moods, which you might find notice when compared with my normal, uplifting style. But the world of television has not been lying supine and helpless on a dentist’s chair. Far from it.

First off, since it’s January you might have noticed there’s a whole bunch of new Finnish shows starting this month. Generally, these are all rehashes of old pap from last year – Choir Wars, that show about farmers trying to find a wife, Finland’s Top Model and so on ad infinitum and, for that matter, ad nauseum too. Sub TV doesn’t have many Finnish-made shows adorning its schedules, and the ones they do have are pretty poor. Unfortunately this includes the one that started last week on Friday at 21:30 the fourth season of Duudsonit, a.k.a. The Duudsons – Finland’s answer to Jackass.

They’ve had their moments – the fake bank robbery from ages ago springs to mind as being pretty funny – but while Johnny Knoxville and his gang of childlike simpletons gave up the ghost a while back, the four Duudsons (there used to be two but in an incredible display of advanced mitosis they just, one day, sprouted two identical replicas) are gamely plodding along, trying to wring the last drops of entertainment value from basic human bodily functions.

In the season opener, the first sketch involved the four of them standing somewhere in the frozen North, in the middle of nowhere, stuffing ice into their mouths. Then they took off their clothes, and stood there in their birthday suits for what I guess must have been at least 45 minutes. Eventually they got a bit chilly and ran off into the sauna. As a spectacle it was hardly riveting stuff – four blokes standing naked in the snow and ice, getting cold. I could do that in my back garden to be honest, except the neighbours would probably call the cops.

The next stunt had three of them hanging upside down, eating and drinking stuff, the plan apparently being to see how far they could go without vomiting through their noses. When the emesis began, I admit I’d had enough. I’m all for puerile stunts but this wasn’t funny or original, just boring and moderately disgusting. They have started speaking in English though, presumably for export purposes, God help us.

The main cultural event last weekend was, of course, Miss Finland 2010. I’m amazed this is still going on really, and I still don’t see the point of it, except to provide blokes with some titillating eye-candy. Those ‘swimsuits’ weren’t half revealing, eh? Phwooar, did you see the size of her knockers? Wouldn’t mind getting a piece of that. Check out her melons! Laaaavely. Fapfapfap. Etc. I could go on about how sexist, insulting, and ridiculous it is, or how you can see beautiful women everywhere in Finland anyway, or that all the women in the show looked pretty good, but only because they’d spent two hours with a hair stylist, a week with a clothes designer, and had three inches of make-up sand-blasted onto their faces. But to be honest, my jaw is hurting, and I can’t be arsed.

Nick Barlow