Like many people, when we have genuinely serious problems our first thought is "Why isn't there a tubby out-of-touch ginger posho millionaire around to shriek patronising advice at us?"

Luckily, one poverty-stricken family in Hull will be getting that exact treatment. Minor royal and all-around annoyance Fergie is going to live with them to help shine a light on what life's like for the cruel minority who, for whatever reason, don't live in massive New York penthouse apartments.

Fergie's doing this for a new ITV reality show, of course, called The Duchess In Hull. It'll be broadcast in the summer, backed by an ITV2 spin-off show called Someone Get Me The Bleach, One Of Them Just Touched Me And I Don't Want To Catch AIDS.

Say what you like about ITV, but you can't deny that it loves its poor people. The Jeremy Kyle Show may as well be called Bad-Suited Pikey-Taunt Hour, while every couple of weeks there'll be a Tonight With Trevor McDonald special called I Sold My Baby To Buy Chips.

This could be because poor people are the only ones desperate enough to spend whatever pittance they earn texting ITV competitions to try and win one of the cash prizes that keeps getting dangled an inch from their face during GMTV and This Morning – but regardless of the reason, ITV has decided to rope in a minor royal to augment its celebration of poverty this summer.  

Fergie – not the knicker-wetting Black Eyed Pea Fergie but the middle-aged ginger woman who used to be married to one of the Queen's sons Fergie – has signed up for new ITV reality show The Duchess In Hull, where she'll visit Preston Road, one of the poorest communities in the country, trail a bunch of single mothers and tut every time they eat crisps as The Times reports:

She promised to use her experience of “eating disorders, low self-esteem, family conflict, financial crisis, divorce and bereavement” to help families on the estate to improve their lifestyle…Families in Preston Road have some of the lowest incomes in Britain, as well as high levels of teenage pregnancy, crime and unemployment. The estate has been selected for a £55 million regeneration scheme. The duchess said: “I do like being with people at street level, where I feel they accept me as I am.” … On her first day she was taken on a shopping expedition with fellow single mothers to Netto, a low-budget supermarket. The duchess picked out cream crackers and margarine.

Funny that, because if we were Fergie we'd hate for people to accept us as we are. That's because Fergie is essentially a needy overprivileged aristocrat who was briefly the most ridiculed woman in the country and seems to think that poor people will take to her because she's a single mother, even though one of her kids is on the cover of fucking Tatler this month and her mother-in-law is the sodding Queen of pissing England. Accepting us for what we are would be the last thing we'd want people to do.

Anyway, it seems as if Fergie's stay with the poor did the trick, because one woman she stayed claims to have lost a stone in a single week thanks to Fergie's intervention. Well, stamping your feet and screaming "I hate that stupid jumped-up cow!" non-stop does burn up a lot of calories.

Read more:

Duchess of York gives diet and debt advice to city’s poor families - Times