Pussies Galore (Channel 4, last Friday)

I only caught the last fifteen or twenty minutes of Channel 4's Pussies Galore documentary, which followed three women whose lives are dominated by their cats, but what I did see was fairly troubling. Perhaps most grotesque of all was the moment when, not content with having endlessly rewashed her fluffy white chinchilla (not an ACTUAL chinchilla, a chinchilla cat) Mr Darcy, his owner, Julie, proceeded to rub what appeared to be talcum powder on his bottom. I probably would have been more shocked, had this not been the same week that I witnessed a man at my gym blow-dry his pubic hair, but I was still alarmed - as, it seems, were the numerous members of Facebook's Under The Paw group who wrote to Janet to express their outrage.

I'm not sure that the documentary ultimately proved anything, other than that Channel 4's researchers' are increasingly adept at hunting out human extremes for their reality shows. Almost as disturbing as Julie was Kelly, who thought nothing of taking her Mr Bigglesworth-style pedigrees out into the neighbourhood in a pushchair. If you had any prejudices about cat-lovers, this programme was not going to disarm you, although the case of the final member of the ailurophile trio, Anne, was actually rather sweet. I wouldn't like her cleaning bills, but her 20 acre Welsh farm, which houses 83 cats, came across as something of a Utopia. There appeared to be a sadness at the heart of Anne's cat love, but in sharp contrast to that of the documentary's other subjects, it was obviously not a selfish sadness. What was also impressive was how well the cats all seemed to get on with one another. It reminded me a bit of the video below, which proves that, while Feliway and Valerian have their uses, there really is nothing better for encouraging feline mellowness than repeatedly playing them the beatific sound Talking Heads' 'This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)'....