Tonight with Trevor McDonald attempted a brilliant hatchet job on TV dietician – and rival popular current affairs host – Gillian McKeith last night. In an edition reminiscent of the bad press treatment of Homer in The Simpsons episode Homer Bad Man, Trev used a selection of unflattering archive footage and take-out-of-context quotes to portray Gill as a fake fad diet doctor with little knowledge of her subject. Admittedly, dead-eyed McKeith is cashing in on the current craze of obsessive healthy eating, but ITV1’s desperate attempt to discredit Channel 4’s stranglehold on the eight ‘til nine lifestyle slot ratings was plain embarrassing. So what if she isn’t a medical doctor, if you’ve spent god knows how long studying for a PhD, then you’ve every right to call yourself a doctor. And just because she’s making a fortune, doesn’t mean she isn’t teaching the obese, chip-eating masses a few good lessons. No one is actually going to follow her diet and eat nothing but bizarre beans and wheat grass for every meal. The only good thing about Trevor’s latest bout of scare-mongering was a rare TV appearance of Gillian’s arhc nemesis - and Guardian hottie - Dr Ben Goldacre, here happily debunking McKeith’s alleged ability to feel internal organs while poncing around in a lab coat. And that was definitely worth half an hour of our increasingly hard-earned free time.

Elsewhere, Corrie’s Les was also facing dietary dilemmas when his bid to win £25 by finding a halfpenny in Roy’s Christmas pudding resulted in him consuming 15 portions of the brandy-soaked stuff. Thankfully it all went awry – with Cilla getting a cleavage full of pudding and Les confined to the toilet after a fight with Betty – but it provided a welcome respite to Charlie’s continual bullying of Shelley. Please, Shelley, turf him out, but congratulations to Corrie writers for convincingly making the once feisty landlady slowly lose all her confidence. And it gets worse after Christmas…