Well I'm very proud of my family this week.  Actually I'm always very proud of them

But this week I'm proud of the fact that my family, despite liking watching mainstream TV together in a group, has managed to completely ignore the media phenomenon that is The Bachelor on TV3.

We're watching The Walking Dead, we're watching The Night Manager and we're watching House of Cards.  But we're not watching The Bachelor and nor do we want to.

We didn't watch the last series either.

It just seems to us to be a dishonest, disingenous, dinosaur of a programme.  The entire premise is yucky.  25 women competing, or should I say simpering and grovelling, for the affection of one man.  Some weird promise of eternal love and happiness after an artificial process witnessed by a nation through a screen.  It's the Truman show with no heart and yet it's supposed to be about love

The essence of competition brings out the worst in human nature and reduces the social interaction to basic facsimiles of normal human behaviour.  It's something based on the social mores of the 50s not 2016.

This year is particularly offensive as the programme makers treat us like fools. The Bachelor works in the tv industry and has been an actor.  He's following a script and not his heart.  Most of the women are also anything but normal civilians.  Nas the nominated bad girl is an obvious plant hired from Australia acting a role of a Persian Princess who's hated for her arrogance, her ethnicity, her accent and Kate Hawkesby even hates her for her boobs.  This is not reality TV.  It's a fiction and the audience is complicit

Just like the worst reality TV programme on the planet at the moment.  That award goes to the American Presidential nomination race in particular the bizarre buzz around the Trump campaign.  Both the players and the audience think they're in the real world but the Trump campaign is also a fiction as is most of the folklore around it.

Trump is his own man.  He's funding it himself goes the legend. What poppy cock. He's loaned his campaign money.  Fat cats will have to pay him back in return for favours somewhere down the road.  Trumps money comes from casinos and hotels so that industry has their man and that industry has enormous mob connections.  Trump is the mob's man.  Plus he's standing for the Republicans and the party is dependent on donations so there's more pipers who pay the tune.

Trump will sort out the beltway.  No he won't. There's three arms of government.  The executive, the house and the senate.  The horse trading happens because compromise is the only way to get all three branches doing the same thing.  The beltway is a result of the constitution that American's hold so dear.

Build a wall he says.  They already have. The secure Fence Act 2006.  Nearly 800 miles of wall and fence.  Budgeted at a cost of 1.5 billion.  It cost closer to eight. The border is 2000 miles long.  The reason the rest of it wasn't built was because it was deemed useless. The bits unwalled are desert and mountains and no-one's jumping the border there.  I've seen only two articles on the practicalities of Trump's proposed wall.  The Washington Post reckons it would cost 15 billion extra and that it could very easily end out costing five times that.  Then you've got to maintain it and then you've got to staff it.  A full wall is so mindbogglingly stupid and yet Trump keeps trumpeting it.

I could go on.  He wants to make America Great again but will never say how.  He wants to do something about ISIS but doesn't know what.  On his many media appearances he spends the whole time insulting and threatening his opponents and no time talking about himself.  There's no great intellectual heft here. And no-one really questions him.

Trump is playing this like a telly show and it's working and it’s our fault.  And just like The Bachelor here in New Zealand it's not reality TV.  The whole thing is a fiction and the audience is complicit.