You have to hand it to BBC Scotland. Just when it seemed that they would let their public down by producing an interesting and experimental series in their current Gruth is Uachdar (a period drama adaptation in a mix of Gaelic and English, beautifully filmed in Harris) they reassert their place as the principal purveyors of awfulness to the people of Scotland by coming up with another series of Tinsel Town.

The first series was bad enough: dreadful acting, strangled accents, contrived story lines, the most bizarre night club seen on television since the demise of The Hitman & Her (it was filmed in the derelict old Govan Prison which, with it’s white tiles and cells had the look of a large public convenience or – funnily enough – a derelict jail). Now the second series has returned with almost all of these faults but also a strange aura of confidence, as if the first run had been either a public or critical success.

Certainly series one attracted attention because of its use of images depicting recreational drug use and of course the homosexual affair between a policeman and a schoolboy (sounds far more interesting than it actually was). But on their own these were not enough to make it work and Tinsel Town was, to my certain knowledge, lampooned by the audience demographic it was supposed to target (including me and my friends).

So it showed people taking ecstasy and smoking hash? So it depicted homosexual affairs? So it featured a couple of drug dealers? All of these things you can see any night of the week in the pubs and clubs of any city in Britain. The inference was that the show was worthy just because it illustrated these things. Sorry, but I’d rather like a bit of plot as well.

Credit where it was due, however, and Dawn Steel (also to be seen in that other picture of every day Scottish life, Monarch of the Glen) stood out as did the actress who played her alcoholic mother in that first series, the excellent Barbara Rafferty (sadly missing, so far, from this series). But apart from them, things were bad in the first series of Tinsel Town.

So could the second series do any better? Actually, it probably managed to be worse. Whereas in the first series we at least got to spend some time with each character as their situation was explained to us, this time round we were simply shown them once more in their new(ish) settings and then we were away. The only discernible change seemed to be that whereas the Tinsel Town of the first series was the aforementioned hackneyed nightclub, the eponymous location for this series is a hackneyed “trendy” clothes shop – although this was hardly referred to at all with only the neon name flashing somewhere in the background for a couple of minor (presumably, although it’s always difficult to tell) scenes.

Then we had our wander along the lives of the main players to see where they are now: Ryan, the boy in the first series who had the affair with the man out of the Scottish Power adverts (which provided the only real watercooler fodder first time round), was in bed with two flamboyant men who had to be thrown out of the window as his parents arrived. Sadly, the flat is on the ground floor. Sandra, his sister, who is now living in the flat with Ryan and her boyfriend Jack (the undertaker from the first series) was at an office do where she was repeatedly called her boss’s “Matthew Pinsent” and then offered a promotion prospect which could mean working over his head. Dawn Steel re-emerged to be confronted at home by a woman of uncertain origin (to us, that is) who told us that the little girl (who may be her daughter or sister, it wasn’t made clear) had “a new daddy” and then there was something to do with the shop of the title but by that time it didn’t really matter.

There was drink, taking lines of cocaine, hash, fags, middle-aged people having sex in their daughter’s room: confused? You will be. Interested? You won’t be.

More than anything else it’s just difficult to see what the point of all this is. Surely not to provide “gritty” drama? dinnerladies is grittier than this. Not as an educational experience? It’s not telling those of us it’s supposed to be targeting anything we don’t know already and have known for years. Is it a soap? A drama? A comedy?

One of its greatest crimes is something I find deeply insulting. It is perfectly clear that the director has said to the actors, okay, it’s set in Glasgow so you must speak with Glaswegian accents but just to make sure everyone can understand you must enunciate every word clearly. What we then get is a bizarre world peopled by a kind of Chic Murray/Rab C Nesbitt/Nicholas Fairbairn hybrid manner of speaking that bears no relation to anything I have ever heard. Imagine someone speaking in a cockney accent but being forced to form each word perfectly. What we have here is a Scottish Eliza Doolittle-esque that sounds simply bizarre and taints the entire production. Couple this with atrocious acting of truly Taggart calibre and we have a real mess of a programme that is merely an image of pretension and nothing more.

Chuck in a few Roxy Music and techno tracks and some special camera effects and what you get is what we are told is “gritty” and “cutting edge”. It’s bloody awful.

It’s hard to make a hedonistic drama; characters doggedly pursuing self-gratification hardly welcome the audience in. In fact they shun us.

But there’s some kudos in this sort of thing, with representations of club-culture and drug-taking equating to a desirable audience demographic. Tinsel Town tonight was another chasing that dragon, and illustrated perfectly the pitfalls of hedonism on the telly. Unless one aspires to that life-style, the programme leaves you cold.

A lot of the first episode was rightly about setting out the stall. Tinsel Town hit us with the obligatory life-style references that are supposed to indicate we’re watching TV on the edge. Hence, the shagging in the toilets scene (surely now a televisual cliché?) popped up half way through, flanked by copious drug-taking and “fucks”. Of course, this is well-trodden ground, and so a little of the Magic Realism was brought into bat too. From time to time we took off into a blur of strobing pictures accompanied by the requisite club music, and then came down into a picture white-out which was meant to represent the – yeah – vibe. And that can be a problem, because you either get into a vibe, or you don’t. This one I didn’t. With Tinsel Town I felt that being in the kitchen at parties was probably the best option.

Our characters stalked around their tiny world, all of them hard-faced and unlikable, yapping their lines to each other, ill-humoured and mean-spirited. I don’t want to spend the next 10 weeks with them. One feels that the programme’s writers are wrongly assured in their creations’ allure – so confident that they neglect to lay in the very necessary ground work of the getting-to-know you variety. As it is, you can only buy into Tinsel Town in the most vicarious fashion. The tiniest chink of light, which gave us the slightest hint of a “in” into the programme were the short scenes with Jack, and his alcoholic mother. However even these were clumsily staged, with Jack storming into his mother’s room and finding an empty gin bottle beneath her pillow. This was laying in the plot in a dot-to-dot fashion, and would have benefited from a little more subtlety. Perhaps if I hadn’t known just what the nature of his domestic problems were, I might have come back next week. As it is, he’ll have to sort his mum out on his own.

Despite all this, Tinsel Town‘s biggest failing was in its representation of homosexuality. For an apparently wised-up series, the depiction was totally backward. In Tinsel Town homosexuality is alien, The Other. Our two gay characters are a policeman who views his sexuality as a dark secret and a below the age of consent schoolboy. Aside from patently knocking off Queer as Folk (and throwing that programme’s awful final episode into a relatively positive light – at least it had wit) we’re drearily tagging “issues” onto homosexuality, ensuring that the programme’s gay characters are posited as talking-points rather than being left to be. A real disappointment.

After one episode I know already that I won’t bother trying to get my kicks in Tinsel Town. I won’t come back. It’s an ugly place, insular and witless. Yeah, it’s sorted for Es and whizz, but what it desperately needs (aside from some heart) is a dose of gay abandon.