A NEW series began this week about weight loss. This topic is nothing new, you might think, but Lose Weight for Love (BBC1, Wednesday) took a different and quite intriguing approach to our obesity epidemic.

The presenter, Professor Tanya Byron, has a theory that obese couples make one another fatter. If you come home from a hard day and your partner, equally exhausted, suggests you both get a takeaway pizza, then who are you to argue? You’ll flop down on the sofa and gratefully accept that warm, floppy cardboard box of luscious, twinkling fat. And if one of you has a sweet tooth and continually brings home Mars bars, chocolate chip cookies and fizzy Haribos then you’d have to be superhuman to avoid helping yourself to a few.

You might well stride home determined to be “good” and eat nothing but limp salad that evening, but when your partner says a Domino’s is on the way then without a will of iron you’re rather stuck.

It would require fantastic willpower, supreme organisational skills and also a lot of extra cash to be able to prepare separate meals for different family members and not be tempted by the junk food someone else has helpfully placed in the fridge.

So this series has a drastic solution. If fat couples are enabling, or subconsciously sabotaging, one another’s attempts to lose weight, then let’s split them up.

The couples who participate in this series will spend ten weeks apart, and undergo physical training, education and dietary re-programming to see if it’s their partner (as well as the chips and burgers) that's causing their weight gain, and whether the fat vanishes when they’re living the single life.

Admittedly, the science in the show was quite tedious. We all know the dangers of overeating and are familiar with obesity’s links to high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes, so there was little need to stress this to the viewer. It’s been said a thousand times.

There was also an irritating denial of responsibility from this week’s overweight couple.

“We’ve tried everything,” said one of them, including the Atkins Diet and “the shrink wrap thing” where they’d slather themselves in cream and then wind a box of cling film around their greased-up bodies, yet there was plenty of footage of them tucking into takeaway curries.

They may have tried “everything” but clearly not the very obvious tactic of cutting out fast food.

But this was not to be a typical weight-loss programme, where the participants surrender takeaways for a month, start taking the dog out and – ta da! – lose weight for a while before inevitably piling it all back on. Instead, this programme waded into psychology and showed us how one partner can imperceptibly alter the habits and thinking of another.

This psychological aspect lifted the series beyond the usual trendy weight-loss advice and boring burblings about broccoli and power-walking. Everyone knows how to lose weight and yet obesity continues to rise. However, showing that you’re secretly and slowly killing your partner is far more sinister, and so could be far more effective.

THERE was much fanfare recently about a comedian bringing a new sitcom to TV.

Unfortunately, it was all aimed at Ben Elton with his awful Shakespeare comedy, Upstart Crow. Had there been any justice in the world the attention would have been on Jo Brand and her new sitcom, Going Forward (Thursday, BBC4).

It’s a loose follow-up to Getting On, her comedy set in a geriatric ward. Kim Wilde (Brand) has now left her work in the NHS and is working for a private health-care provider called, with poisonously quiet humour, Buccaneer.

Kim is calm, good and patient – and utterly exhausted by her job, where she has to zoom from house to house, trying to “care” for her elderly patients within a miserably short time-slot before dashing off to the next. She has to meet her targets with Buccaneer, but the human needs of her patients mean she simply cannot.

Private health care, with its targets and timesheets, is not compatible with compassion.

The opening scenes are almost drained of colour as the morning sun bleaches Kim’s kitchen, and it’s not a pleasant, warming sunrise, but a blazing, intrusive reminder that the day has begun and all must rush, rush, rush off to work. Capitalism is breathing down your neck and demanding your subservience. And it also demands that you abandon the elderly man who hasn’t been fed or ignore the appalling loneliness of the old woman whose son never rings her.

It’s a slow, sly, clever sitcom, filled with despair and meandering dialogue, and yet all the attention has been on Ben Elton’s watery rehash of Blackadder. If you told Kim this she’d just give a weary sigh and get on with things. She doesn’t have the time to worry about self-important men in tights.

BUT every week needs its dud and we found it in Locked Up (Tuesday, C4), which is a new Spanish-language drama.

In TV drama a foreign language normally denotes quality, but not in this case – not when we’re dealing with pretty, breathless Macarena, who’s being sent to jail. Everything was absurd, from the obvious good looks and fresh faces of the convicts (who looked especially bright and appealing in their yellow jumpsuits, almost like an off-duty urban dance troupe who’re hoping for their big break on Britain’s Got Talent) to Macarena phoning Mummy to say that she’s off on a sailing trip because she doesn’t want to upset her parents by saying she’s in jail.

The show needs to decide whether it’s a comedy or a drama. Is it a Spanish version of Orange is the New Black (albeit in yellow) or is it a hard-hitting tale of life in a women’s prison? Or perhaps it’s a messy mash-up of both, and so we’ll have a prison drama on our hands that is unintentionally ridiculous, like Prisoner: Cell Block H. Even then, silly Macarena can be no match for swaggering, red-headed Bea or wee Lizzie, the shrunken crone.