I haven't written an article for at least three months. I thought I was out of the game, living out the rest of my days peacefully, watching only quality television like The Crystal Maze. But they couldn't let me rest. They had to keep pushing and now I'm back. This week I've been looking at episode one of Desperate Scousewives, the latest in a string of civic versions emulating the kind of American reality TV shows I'd rather be buried alive than watch. There's a mathematical formula to predict the end of civilisation, and Desperate Scousewives is definitely part of the equation.

It starts off with an obnoxious female Liverpudlian voice-over, Jodie, talking up the merits of her city: “the amazing buildings, the brilliant shops, the coolest night-life, and music? We invented that 'n all.” Less than a minute into Scousewives and I'm already hearing the most irritating examples of regional pride possible. Fun fact: I got addicted to painkillers while writing this review.

Not long into the first episode we meet attractive blonde sisters Gill and Debbie, and in no time at all this ultra-realistic portrayal of scouse life turns bizarrely homoerotic, as we see the two sharing a double bed, giving each other sultry looks and spouting lines like “you're single like me now”, “I'm fed up with men, I just want to have fun” and “I'd rather share a bed with you than any man”. The sisters have actually been a highlight of the show so far; I'd go as far as pitching a spin-off to Channel 4 featuring the two of them meeting Josef Fritzl. We could call it The Only Way is Incest.

By the twenty minute mark, I'm already more than sick of Desperate Scousewives. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I've seen episodes of Hollyoaks that are more realistic than this. Are the characters supposed to be likable? Am I supposed to care what they're doing? A group of young, good-looking airheads who are all obsessed with each other, sitting in a fancy pub talking about what an amazing time they're going to have at the Style Awards. I would get bored eavesdropping on conversations like this, never mind watching them unfold in a 45 minute TV programme format.

When they make these programmes, why do they always pick the same kind of annoying pissants to follow around? Ditzy blondes, flamboyantly homosexual entrepreneurs, skin-headed “ladies men” who can't read. People I couldn't stand talking to for five minutes in a nightclub. Give me a heroin addict, a mechanic and an overweight woman who works in Blockbuster.

I thought I understood scousers. I mean not the accent, I'd still need a translator, but the actual people. Their sense of humour, what drives them, what they're proud of. They're from a scrappy working class shit-hole, I'm from a scrappy working class shit-hole. There's a sense of camaraderie I get when I meet someone from Liverpool, similar to when I meet people from Leeds or Manchester or even Belfast. Plenty of cities in Europe fit the bill. You're not culturally identical, but there's a mutual understanding, you know what makes each other tick. That's what makes shows like Desperate Scousewives so worrying. I'm reminded of an old poem, which I'm sure we can all agree has become all the more relevant in this day and age:

First they came for Essex,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't from Essex.

Then they came for Newcastle,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Geordie.

Then they came for Liverpool,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Scouser.

Next they'll come to Glasgow,

and I'll be subjected to some twat with a Glasgow University accent on next year's Celebrity Big Brother.

We can't allow television production companies to keep turning our proud traditional cities into wannabe American cartoon character orgies. The next time you're walking down the street and you see someone who looks like they'd sign up for one of these shows, I want you to walk up to them, snap the Kanye West sunglasses off their face, and place them under citizen's arrest. Waterboard them until they stop calling you “bro”, garrotte them until they stop defiling their culture, yank their teeth out until they agree to a haircut that isn't from a glossy magazine, and then kill them anyway. Because you can't be t