Just why is Ally so pally with Dame Edna

Hot property, channel 5

Proof that the ozone layer is thinning was there in spades on Ally McBeal. The show is seriously over-heating. What was once zany (all those flash-fantasies of the characters hitting the sack, or wreaking revenge) has been upped several notches and passed through the stratosphere of absurdity.

Ally, volatile, scary, screwed up, and sex-fixated, is all of a sudden senior partner in the law firm McBeal and Fish. Which means (cue fanfare of derision) Richard Fish, the office’s bozo, is number two.

And what is John Cage, their most gifted courtroom guy, doing dressed in a giant sombrero waving maracas in a night-club? Has he flipped, or just read the script? And now he’s urgently required to take on Lolita, the girl-wonder brief who has put the wind up Ally and Rich in another sexual harassment case. His comeback inspires courtroom action of the outlandishly seductive kind, Lolita getting so fresh she practically pops in Cage’s lap.

That’s bad enough, but even more dire is the double-celebrity squeeze on the action caused by the presence of Jon Bon Jovi, playing the plumber who babysits Ally’s pubescent daughter, and Barry Humphries as Claire Otoms, a part that’s dragged out as much as dragged up and is merely Dame Edna in downmarket tweeds instead of gold lame. Bon Jovi’s hairdo is pure Herman’s Hermits, a mop-top tribute to sweetie-pie rock.

He looks like something puked up by the dog. Given that Humphries isn’t stupid and knows he is playing in a show that is spinning crazily out of its own, never concentric, orbit, all you’re left with is the surmise that Otoms is purely part of his pension plan - easy money, but terrible lines: "I played trains and tunnels with that special somebody last night," "she" confides to Ally with that trademark Edna smirk.

The special somebody is Jerome, a suspect loser who may be stiffing her for her savings. Jerome was played by Loudon Wainwright, a scurrilous singer-songwriter back when flower power had nothing to do with gladioli. I remember Loudon once screaming the lyric: "Don’t give a dose to the one you love most." If he’d known it was Claire he might have recanted and made an exception.

Yet even when dreadfully surreal, Ally McBeal still entertains as it explodes in self-ridicule. Last night, while the plumber and Ally were on a date, the substitute babysitter croaked while watching telly.

Yes, television can even terminate your health in the crazy world of Boston attorneys. And in due course Calista Flockhart’s mouth will gobble up the rest of her, and the series will be over with a gulp.

Meanwhile, John Cage seems reinstated, a reason to keep on tuning in weekly. He’s looking more sombre without his sombrero - or maybe he’s just seen his lines for next week.

If John were a house he’d be detached, with a secret garden somewhere to practice his introvert nature. Lolita would rummage his secret places and move in at once. It was much the same in Cardiff, on the new series of Hot Property. This show deserves more space in a future column, but its premise is simple: a young couple could win a house if they guess its asking price to within 500.

For Channel 5, the stingiest quiz show network of all (remember the cheapskate One Hundred to One?) this is serious bucks with which to be taking risks. But the show has a heartbeat to match its bravado - being a refuge for new romance as each week the wives (yes, the duos are newlyweds) testify amply to hubby’s soft side. Last night it was Martin scribbling poetry. "He means everything," gushed Rhianne. Martin smiled like a man who had everything but a house.

His guess was awful, so was hers. But, relax, they’re still a rhyming couplet.