HERE'S the pitch. A television show with no swearing, nudity, violence or outrageous behaviour of any kind whatsoever.

The children featured in the programme are pleasant, amusing, do all their homework and household chores with a smile and don't listen to gangsta rap at unfeasible volumes in their bedrooms.

The father is a hard-working man who makes time for his kids, likes the odd drink and football in sensible measures, is totally faithful to his wife and is always happy to go to B&Q with her on a Sunday.

The mother is warm-hearted, contented with her life, loves watching football with her husband and even likes The Simpsons.

Their house is tasteful, tidy, neat and full of neutral colours with no obtrusive ornaments and the family dog has a modelling contract with Pedigree Chum.

Dull? Boring? Want first go with the machine gun?

Of course, any TV company would laugh you out of their office at the prospect of producing a programme that, to them, has no basis in reality.

"Where's the confrontation?" they would ask. "Where's the conflict? The anger?"

Reality TV is nothing without rivalry, strife and fury. Hell's Kitchen, I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, Big Brother and the most fatuous and demeaning of them all, Celebrity Wrestling, all depend on the catalyst of personal conflict (and greed of course) to pull in the ratings.

But it's not real life and we now have a raft of fly-on-the-wall documentaries to remind us just how unpleasant some lives can be out there in the real world (as if the daily news doesn't supply us already).

Bad behaviour is something all parents witness and suffer most days and I suppose there's some benefit in seeing that my child is an absolute angel compared with 13-year-old Ben.

He was the "star" of last Tuesday's first episode of a series that has a child behaviour expert trying to advise parents how to deal with their wayward kids.

Ben, however, gave an entirely different meaning to the word "troubled". In fact, he made Damien, the son of the Devil in The Omen, look like Aled Jones.

As well as being captain of the British Swearing Team, he was as violent, bullying and threatening as any teenager I have ever seen.

(Only the Chelsea fans watching Eidur Gudjohnsen's woeful miss in the dying seconds of the Champions League semi-final on another channel could have outdone him for expletives.)

For an hour, this car crash television would have kept millions (of non-football fans at least) truly transfixed.

And what did we learn?

Yes, our children don't generally thump us, threaten us with knives or trash our houses.

Yes, a child behaviour expert on the end of a phone as your child kicks lumps out of you is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

Recently, I was happy to answer criticism that this newspaper - and many others - doesn't do enough to promote the good in youngsters, rather than the bad.

It's a valid point and one that I'm happy to argue when you look how much positive news about young people that the Echo publishes.

But when you look at TV today, it's very easy to see how we can all get tarred with the same brush.

First published: May 9