I might’ve been wrong because, although The Fairy Jobmother was daft and phoney in many respects, it was at least fair-handed with it’s participants, and Taylor herself wasn’t the ogre you might assume her to be.

With her bizarre neckerchief and starchy suits alongside that severe Tony & Guy military haircut, Taylor looks like a sadistic Avon Lady, a violent sticky-beak and a Jobcentre Plus thug, all at once. But despite appearances, on the evidence of The Fairy Jobmother, she’s a decent sort at heart.

Episode one was a very straightforward piece of formatting – doubtless all the other shows in the series will be as rigidly structured – and concerned Dean and Maxine, a couple who struggled to look after daughter Olivia despite taking a rather hefty £261 per week between them in benefits. In the initial stages, we genuinely did get a sense of how their accumulated debt was holding the couple back from seeking work, and even got the expected outpouring of disgust at ‘these immigrants’ from Dean – but crucially we were also given the sense that even he didn’t believe the spiel. As the show went on it was sympathetic to their situation and enabled them to take on work experience and eventually find work.

The circumstances by which they got that work were entirely suspect, and that’s where the Hayley Taylor’s expertise falls down. Gaining Maxine unpaid work experience at Boots and Dean a wageless stint on the bins might’ve been possible in the real world, but grabbing the latter an interview with a fittings company out of the blue was unrealistic, to the point where those genuinely seeking work in the real world might be moved to complain. Job-hunting isn’t that simple for people with a patchy CV, and this was The Fairy Jobmother’s Achilles heel, effectively making it purely bludger-voyeurism, created for those comfortably in work to sit and gawp at the underclass.

That said, the production crew picked their participants well. Dean may not have been a particularly bright bulb, but he was keen and seemingly decent, so only the hardest heart will have remained unmoved when it was revealed he’d stuck at the job enthusiastically up to the point of broadcast. The only issue with this whole effort is the method by which he got the position - and that’s a point that rankles, slightly.

Liam Tucker is the founder of Watch With Mothers