The bargain basement alternative to Wife Swap, Holiday Showdown is a programme which brings the public exactly what they can never quite admit that they want: ring-side seats at a bun fight.

The producers of Wife Swap still labour under the delusion that they are actually conducting a social experiment, and the people that participate in the show learn and grow as a result of the experience. ITV aren’t interested in that sort of thing. Hence they called their programme Holiday Showdown. Not Experience. Not Experiment. Showdown.

In order to ensure the participants don’t have the slightest chance of getting along, they are carefully selected from opposite ends of the spectrum. In times gone by, the families featured in Holiday Showdown would either have been reserved a place in their ancestral crypt, or squeezed into a mass plot with 18 other members of their impoverished relatives. Class war – yeah!

This week’s episode featured the Browns, whose chosen, urm, holiday (?) was a week long survival course in Scotland. They were all dressed in full combat gear and had more than a hint of the Jonestown about them. Catching your own food, digging your own toilet, squatting inside your miserable shelter that it took your shivering offspring six hours to build and the rain 2 minutes to beat holes through – apparently this is the stuff that blissful memories are made of.

They were reluctantly accompanied by the Maybes, who prefer to take a yearly break in Lanzarote, melting by the pool and staving off alcohol poisoning.

Surprisingly, and very amusingly, the Maybes excelled in the wilderness. They constructed a weather proof shelter in less than an hour, and managed to skin a fully grown deer with less effort than it takes to peel a banana. The Browns didn’t know whether to be impressed, or disgruntled. They settled for disgruntled. The only member of the Maybe family who remained stoically sulky and disinterested was their teenage daughter Jodie. Two days in, not a decent meal inside her previously very well-fed stomach, Jodie broke down and refused to go on. I suspect that the crew bribed her with a family size bag of Minstrels, because she somehow made it to the end of the week without developing hypoglycaemia.

And then it was over to Spain, which the Browns were resolute not to enjoy. There’s not much self-improvement to be found on a sun-lounger, or the works of Jackie Collins. So what’s the point?

The point is, we want to see a ruddy great fight. Unusually, this week, it never materialised. As it turned out, everybody had a ruddy good time instead, but this didn’t make it any less entertaining. Crazed with joy at the prospect of enjoying themselves for a change, the three Brown children betrayed their parents and hailed the nearest banana boat. To distract them from the wilful destruction of their daughter’s closely guarded innocence, the Maybes took the senior Browns to their first ever nightclub and plied them with tequila till their faces started folding in.

Having experienced life on the other side of the tracks, did the families return home and reflect? No. They both proudly announced that they were sticking to what they knew, and lambasted their rivals for not coming round to their way of thinking. Not exactly a happy ending, but a very predictable one.

Holiday Showdown, Tuesdays at 9pm, ITV