This TV schlock show has got me hooked

Happily, I almost always find through dinner party chitchat that I am not alone.

This year's talking point is Gossip Girl, a new weekly series on the CW network. It is almost certain to hit Britain, for the simple reason that, like Dallas, Sex and the City and Beverly Hills 90210, Gossip Girl is an American fantasy world.

Officially the show follows the lives of six beautiful, mega-rich Manhattan pupils through their final year at a private high school on the Upper East Side. Really the show is just a paean to unlimited wealth and beauty, with a rather vague attempt at recreating Pilgrim's Progress, since the idea is that somehow each character has the chance to rise above their spoiled lives to become something better. Meanwhile you sit back and ogle extraordinary eye-candy.

Each week sensational-looking actors and actresses, barely out of their teens, dressed in couture, are waited on hand and foot and chauffeur driven to school and Upper East Side bars where they knock back martinis, paid for on their parents' charge cards. These kids are far too sophisticated to spend time in the classroom. They've got more important businesses to attend to: throwing orgies, rescuing siblings from rehab, trying to reconnect their louche, divorced parents.

Even my husband is hooked. "This isn't about high school; it's pornography," he announced when, two weeks ago, a vampy brunette called "Blair Waldorf", heiress to a department store chain (Joan Collins's Alexis reincarnated as a 16-year-old), performed a striptease on a burlesque stage right after she was dumped by her boyfriend.

Were it not for the outraged blogs from real NY private school attendees after the first episode, I'd be worried. After all, we are in the laborious process of applying for kindergarten spaces for our boys and the series did, for a second, give me pause about what might come out the other end of these Manhattan private schools.

However, since comments on sites like Gawker read: "This is just 90210 in New York", my feeling now is just to sit back and enjoy the show, treating it as something that is increasingly rare on TV: entertainment.