The fourth season of The Simple Life ended on Sunday, with an empty conclusion to the big Paris/Nicole catfight we’d been teased with all season. The series had already outstayed its welcome – there are only so many times you can laugh at Nicole Richie dressing a child as a whore before it wears a little thin. And yet it started with such promise! This opening sequence, a weird faux-dramatization of the Hilton/Richie feud, is instant classic camp. The bad porn-film acting! Paris crying, “That bitch let my dog out!” The shot of the cookie shattering on the ground! Mark my words – in 10 years time this clip will become a classic televisual text studied by downtrodden undergraduates trying to pinpoint the essence of artifice and exaggeration in Paris’s slack-shouldered swagger across Coffee Bean. Good Luck Bitches!

– Steven Corfe