A Different Breed   ITV Home Studios Entertainment RRP: £19.99 37115347336 Certificate: 12 Available 30 May 2011

If the words "From the makers of the fabulous Pineapple Dance Studios and Louie Spence's Show Business" gets your heart racing, then get a copy of A Different Breed, which turns the attention of this level of incisive journalism onto the world of dog owners.

Being television at its most exploitative, there was no chance that the producers were going to search out a bunch of level headed dog owners. No, what they were after was the loony extreme of the spectrum and boy did they find them.

Now, as an owner of four cats, I will admit that I do talk to the little buggers, but there seems to be one important difference between the normal pet owner and the people on display here. The majority of us place our greater affections in our partners and children. Without those connections some of the souls on here in this series have gone way past anthropomorphism and created, at times, an unhealthy relationship with their pet.

There is a sort of theme throughout the series, by showing owners behaving in a way that must make their dogs wonder how we ever got to be the dominant species on the planet. You will meet the woman convinced that her dog has licentious thoughts about her, others who dance with dogs, a brilliant dog psychic - for all the wrong reasons - who tells the camera that she hears the dogs speak in differing accents. Well, most of the time - though sometimes she feels like she is talking to herself. Then there's a rather stupid woman who feeds her dog inappropriate food, Louise Wilsher, who runs a crèche for dogs, torturing them with her pretty awful keyboard skills and living in the belief that the spirit of her childhood dog lives inside her. The list just goes on and on.

This is car crash television at its best. It’s the thing that we have replaced the old circus freak show with. And, by the general output of this sort of television, it would seem that there is a never ending stream of people who display an almost monumental lack of self-insight or self-respect, happy to display their eccentricities for the fifteen minutes of fame, promised by Andy Warhol. The series is at turns very funny, oddly tragic and generally barking mad.

In the set you get the eight-part series spread over two DVDs, the whole thing running to about three hundred and fifty minutes.

5

Charles Packer