Superhuman: Super Strong ITV1, 9pm Katy Brand's Big Ass Show ITV2, 10pm Many scenes in Superhuman: Super Strong were so powerfully comic as to make a glum titan weep. Speaking for my weak-kneed self, tears of malicious glee flowed at the odd spectacle of Ukraine's Akulova family.
Employing a self-devised training regime, driven dad Uri Akulova had fashioned 16-year-old daughter Varya into a power-lifting record-breaker. Uri's conditioning process began with him attaching bags of rice to Varya's wrists and ankles when she was five days old. Strength-tastic! And arguably bonkers.
The Akulovas have become a circus act of the freakshow type, Varya wowing crowds by carrying pater and mater on her teenaged back, plus two other male adult volunteers.
Film of this unique feat captured Mrs Akulova atop her daughter's shoulders, grinning and preening like a satanic ventriloquist's dummy. For reasons beyond explanation, one of the two grown men hanging from Varya's biceps was wearing wellingtons and a floral skirt. Showbiz pizazz evidently has a different definition in Ukraine.
The world of bodybuilding is a singular one, too. Superhuman: Super Strong profiled self-sculpted Welshman James "Flex" Lewis, a young chap who dines exclusively on fish five times a day and has thighs almost as wide as his waist.
Flex was also seen posing in a thong for his male trainer, happily acceding to the latter's request to "turn right round for me and just tighten up on your glutes". It's not every chap who would, you know.
In addition, we met West Virginia's motor-mouthed world arm-wrestling champion, Travis "The Beast" Bagent. His technique - intimidatory screaming and half-formed insults - mirrored George W Bush's Middle East policy, albeit with more success.
Elsewhere, mahogany-toned folk who rippled and bulged like obscene maggot-filled sausages carried buses one-handed while cracking walnuts with their eyelids. Epic! Hilarious!
The same verdict applies to Katy Brand's Big Ass Show, returning for its second series, and surely due a prime-time run on old-school grown-up telly.
Ms Brand is especially good at lampooning modern-day celebrity vacuity, sharply impersonating well-to-do pop stars who, like Adele, have spent their time at the Brits Performing Arts and Technology School learning the profitable art of seeming chav-like. Brand's other musical targets for satire included Identikit indie-pop chick Katie White from the Ting Tings and that latter-day Jill of all trades (so long as they all involve being off-hand in a one-note voice), Lily Allen.
With gleeful acerbity, Brand also tore into Coleen McLoughlin, Kate Winslet, Sadie Frost, HM The Queen (reimagined as a thuggish, gravel-throated sister to the Kray Twins) and Kate Moss.
Privileged princesses Beatrice and Eugenie copped it, too, being inventively depicted as the hostesses of their own cruel palace parlour version of Dragons' Den, a jolly royal pastime which entailed the extortion of cash from cowed members of the Yorkie girls' household staff.
Brand's roster of fictional characters was similarly fresh, although Jesus's nagging girlfriend had a tired air of sexist stereotype about her. But you couldn't help but admire Brand's Victorian strumpet, her possessed baby-killer and her self-deluding pudding addict.
There was also a timely Olympics gag about the downside to Team GB 2012's emergence in London's proletarian east end, or as Brand's chirpy Cockney wannabe gold medallist put it: "Who needs a house when you've got a world-class equestrian centre?"
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