Celebrity Fit Club (ITV2)

WHY they can't go the whole hog and call this Celebrity Fat Club, I don't know. The latest batch of outsize recruits certainly look as if they've eaten the whole hog, while darts champion Andy Fordham looks like he has a whole herd stuffed up his jumper.

Even he was surprised that he weighed 30st 8lbs. He was lucky to find scales that would tell him. The last time he tried, his weight came up as "error". No wonder - it's difficult to see someone so large (19st overweight for his size) still standing.

He's been spurred on to participate following a nasty turn at a recent darts match, which turned out to be heat exhaustion caused by his incredible bulk. Andy was known as the whippet at school, now he drinks 25 bottles of beer a day. The panel monitoring the celebs' efforts to get more fit and less fat described his alcoholic intake as astonishing. He assured them he intended to cut his consumption by half. "From astonishing to staggering," they said.

Andy wasn't so much staggering as standing still, out of breath, after walking 130 metres. Presenter Dale Winton's comment that "I think you are just going to run through this" seemed wildly optimistic.

There is a serious point to Celebrity Fit Club that we shouldn't forget. Half the people in this country are overweight. More than half of the eight celebrities have a problem that may shorten their lives unless they do something about it. If the programme convinces some of us to eat healthier food and take more exercise, it will have done a valuable job as well as allowing viewers to watch celebrities suffer.

Different celebs have different reasons for joining the club. Andy wants to get fit for the sake of his health. Paul Ross wants to be fit before he's 50 and look good in a pair of Speedos. Pop diva Kym Mazelle feels she has too much booty to shake. Her weight of 15st 2lbs makes her "morbidly obsese". Half her body is currently fat. Put like that it brings home the problem.

Restauranteur to the stars Aldo Zilli - at 14st 12lbs "medically obese" - wants to slim down for his younger, model girlfriend. Ex-Coronation Street star Julie Goodyear "loves food", having put on two stones since leaving Weatherfield. "The waistline fairy crept into my bedroom one night and stole it. I want it back," she said.

The real problem, you sense, is going to be Wife Swap's Lizzy Bardsley, with her habit of answering back whenever granite-faced fitness instructor Harvey gives her an order. I agreed with him that if she put the energy she uses answering back into her fitness training, she'll lose weight a lot quicker.

At 15st 2lbs, she's "morbidly obese", a condition not helped by being an asthma sufferer who smokes 30 cigarettes a day. She has eight children - you'd think that looking after them would keep her fitter than she is.