The second is that it is not easy for a Tower Block Ange to meet and mix with a toff like Sir Sebastian. But both difficulties are overcome with singular ease, due to the observable facts that all men are either incredibly stupid, or slaves to their genitals.Added to this is the extraordinary talent that Ange has for instant self improvement, as though (to take the example of Pygmalion) she has an inner auto-Higgins. For, one moment she is speaking like Raine Spencer, and the next she slips back into Sharon’n’ Tracey. Thus is she able to pass between the sharply delineated worlds (sex-mad, fast-car, greedy-bastard aristos versus shouty, gurning, chain-smoking, battered, battering underclass) with impressive fluidity.So it is that the second she shows herself to Sebastian in her French lacy underthings, he is irredeemably lost It is a short step from here to consummation In his case, a very short step. His chest touches hers, and this – verbatim – is how he progresses from excitement to ecstasy: “Oh Ah Mmm Oh Ah Ah Oh Ahah Ahahahahah Ooh Whoo. Wherr.” If Sir Sebastian runs his multinational company with similar economy, then it is easy to see why he’s so successful.It all comes unstuck in the end.

There are problems in the family, and rich daughter Honesty – seen shagging a rough-looking man up against a wall (a sure sign of waywardness) – eventually precipitates confession “Please try to understand,” Ange urges Seb. And this is quite a request, given that she is asking him to comprehend that she is actually a semi bag lady, who has entrapped him, bigamously married him, and passed another man’s son off as his. In this Bank Holiday B-novel adaptation Ange, an underclass lass, stuck in a verminous high-rise with a young kid and a feckless, work-shy husband, takes it into her head that the obvious way out of the infested rookeries is through seducing – and bigamously marrying – a middle-aged captain of industry. But – in the end – giving Ulrika her own show is a bit like marrying the au pair. It might seem like a good idea at the time, but where does it leave you?
Judging by the outcome of The Beggar Bride (BBC1, Sun & Mon), it will not lead to happiness. That’s why her most convincing lampoon was the take-off of Anthea Turner, a star of amazing pointlessness.

Once Ulrika might have been everything that Anthea is, but now she’s ironic – and that makes her something much more substantial Well maybe. In the show, of course, she is taking the mickey out of herself; sending up the idea of someone who could become famous by reading the weather, or introducing talentless hunks to screaming studio audiences. If she looked like Kathy Burke she would not have had a career in telly. Her private life is almost a media construction itself, for she has been married to a TV cameraman and lived with – of all things – a Gladiator called Hunter (and I don’t suppose they discussed Proust over their gravadlax). Celebrity today requires irony, otherwise it is embarrassing So It’s Ulrika! (BBC2, Mon) is the ultimate new show.

Its star looks nice (though “oozing sex”, as one paper has it, does insufficient justice to her inner iciness), is charming, clearly intelligent, and has sufficient ability not to make herself look idiotic. But she is – far more than most – essentially a media construction, an empty, elegant glass vessel, into which various coloured liquids are poured by the likes of Reeves and Mortimer She is not a singer, a dancer, or a comic. As her draperies slide off, they hang from her like the unravelled sleeves of a straitjacket. And as the solo proceeds, she goes through various transformations: a masked orientalist dancer, moving her covered head as if it weren’t quite attached to her body; a more formal dancer, dignified in stiff silk. These represent different stages of Wigman’s career and personal life, but you don’t need to know that. Hommage is a dance about transformation, about refining and essence. By the end, plain and simple steps are suffused with a sense of what has gone before.Jenny Gilbert returns next week..

The vocabulary is simple, but dense with allusions and implications The dance opens with her draped in white robes She contrives to look at once like a bride and a vampire. The young women appear in idealised dances as he flails about the stage, and his solo is lost in a surprisingly lovely final dance.Hommage Mary Wigman is a solo for Bozsik, based on the life and career of the German dancer. Dances with their own partners are inflected according to relationship: the bride’s parents join the young people’ s dance with a weariness of spirit, and it is no surprise when the father (Tams Vati) rages against the loss of his daughter, against his own approaching age. Her dancers are marvellous, investing each twitch with a wealth of comic and psychological detail. Both families have the darkest suspicions of each other, and of their child’s new partner; characters bundle their own relatives out of the way, indulging in other people’s fantasies. The choreography deals with the wandering minds of the party as they drift from the celebrations into violently indecorous dances.