Five's dating show The Love Bus is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit shit. The “dating show with a twist” revolves around a simple premise: one singleton rides the Love Bus while other singles get on at various points and have until the next stop to impress. If a date fails to woo then he or she gets off the bus to be replaced by someone else; if things go well they can stay on and continue the date.

An emergency stop button can be pressed if things are going really badly, and the guy or girl who makes it to the end of the journey gets a date. So, will our “flirty somethings” (not my pun, alas, but the show’s) find love? Will it be happily ever after for our “cuddle-worthy singles”? The answer, fairly obviously, is probably not.

Given that they have only a few minutes to strike up a romance, many of the contestants see fit to put on mini-performances such as poetry readings or songs, leading to often tragic consequences.

When one aging rocker opts for an air-guitar demonstration it is, depressingly, something of a relief – a fact which gives you an idea of just how crushing the rest of the programme is.

This is car-crash telly at its most gaudy and horrendous. The Love Bus itself is decked out like Ikea on acid, and while presenter Zoe Salmon does her best to add a flirty, up-beat element to proceedings even she must be wondering where things went so wrong. “The love bus can be so cruel” she sighs wistfully at one point.

The best thing that can be said for The Love Bus is that it might be entertaining TV at 3am when you’ve just come back from a club, drunk and alone. But even then it would probably only serve to highlight your own isolation as you find yourself connecting with the increasingly desperate singletons in all their doomed glory.

“So will it be ding ding or ding dong?” presenter-turned-wordsmith Zoe asks at the beginning of each new episode, her hollow eyes peering out at us. If "ding dong"means anything other than 'avoid', I’d opt for the former.