Do people enjoy watching programs featuring the human body at its most repulsive? The success of shows such as Embarrassing Bodies would seem to infer this. Though the actual attraction of such reality shows really is a mystery, Skin Deep tries to get in on some of this medical voyeurism action and fails.

The purpose of Skin Deep is to “investigate various beauty disaster stories and try to work out what went wrong”, the powdery Cheryl Cole lookalike presenter tells her audience. It is difficult to tell whether the program supports the potentially damaging and scarring beauty treatments it details or is genuinely trying to warn people of dangers. The Cheryl clone’s apparent love of plastic surgery gives a mixed message.

The stories that are investigated seem ridiculously trivial and not even that disgusting - a small bald patch and a scarred hand, both no longer than a couple of centimetres. Neither seem overwhelmingly traumatic or especially painful which is what the audience would have expected in a program who’s raison d’etre is to examine beauty ‘disasters’. There are no interesting characters; the girls' complaints and ‘horror stories’ fail to provide compelling viewing, leaving the audience uninspired.

Not simply lacking depth, the show also lacks content, following the accounts of two girls whose stories didn’t have much substance. The same thin material is used again and again in an exhaustive narrative, followed by an interview with the victim, a re-hashing of the narrative, a summary and then finally the ‘climax’ of an interview with the guilty party- the perpetrator of a dodgy haircut or piercing. By this point any sensible person is so bored with the story of a bald patch that they’re likely pulling their own hair out.

Adding up the results of an annoying model as a presenter, lacklustre stories as an excuse for content and some vaguely gross pictures of scars and a little blood as its gore; Skin Deep sums to a pretty boring show that lacks any message or direction. Is it condemning the beauty treatment industry? It even avoids metaphysical questions - should we be looking for inner beauty over its ‘skin deep’ counterpart? Or just avoid dodgy piercing and beauty treatment shops? The focus seems to be on the latter, but there is no attention paid to the fact that some of the effort these girls put into artificial beauty is headed for disaster anyway.