Of Barbie dolls, tucks, sucks, pokes and snips a dazzling variety of

'LA does not stand for Los Angeles,' said Robin Leach, the appropriately named presenter who has made his own fortune out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, 'it stands for liposuction and augmentation.' Hollywood Women (ITV) was full of such one-liners, mostly because the cutting was so frenetic that interviewees rarely made it past the first full stop. Only a few of those talking were given more than 10 seconds to get their message across. One was Anastasia Alexander, an 'erotic actress' who you might describe as a cheerfully upfront type, if there hadn't been quite so much silicone about.

She supplied the best footnote to the way in which Hollywood takes fresh-faced home-town girls and then spends a fortune turning them into Hollywood's idea of a fresh-faced home-town girl. 'This guy came up to me in the gym the other day,' she recalled, 'and said 'You look so natural'. And I felt like looking him right in the eyes and saying, 'This is hair dye, I have hair extensions, I have coloured contacts, I've had my nose done four times, my face peeled and this is a breast augmentation and a fake tan. But thanks'.'

The fidgety editing paid off in one respect, making it easier for the film to convey the almost stupefying quantities of physical beauty and desperate ambition that you find on those sun-drenched streets, the repetition of the same old story so many times. One sequence of rapid cuts - like a flip through a model agency's catalogue - delivered a gazetteer of American place names, the great catchment area of small-town dreams from which this torrent of hope had flowed. Another ran you through the full menu of surgical improvements available to the determined ingenue, a dazzling variety of tucks, sucks, pokes and snips. But there are disappointments. 'Even though I have large breasts they move when I walk and I don't get parts because of that,' explained another erotic actress, distressed at her normality. The doctors just can't help her.

'I'd like to get a part in a major movie,' said another actress who appeared to have avoided the dangers of silicone sacs by opting for double basket-ball insertion instead. They were going to have to go widescreen to fit her part in but she was sure she was going to make it. 'How will I get on top? Whatever I have to do to get there.' Hire a crane would be my advice.

Was any of it very new? Not really; you learnt that young girls are gullible about their chances, that you have to work hard to succeed, that Hollywood can be a tough town. It wasn't exactly painful to watch - a succession of beautiful women engaging in sharp girl-talk - but it would have been nice, just occasionally, to hear from the corpulent dwarfs who have transformed LA into a town of Barbie dolls and to have something a little more nutritional to chew on than sassy sound-bites. The closest you came to substance here were some laconic asides from Roseanne Barr about plastic surgery ('I had my pupils removed because I want to look like Little Orphan Annie') and the occasional elegantly raised eyebrow from Lauren Bacall - though it was notable that even her acerbic comments on the cult of youth and beauty were delivered from behind a heavy and forgiving filter.

I was a little snotty about Michael Ignatieff's series Blood and Belonging (BBC 2) after the first programme so it's only fair to report that recent episodes have been fascinating. I still can't understand why he presents nationalism as an ambiguous quality, when it seems clear that even its most benign manifestations - pride of place and ancestry - lend themselves so readily to murder, but his programmes have the rare quality of showing you countries actually straining at the seams.

Last night he returned to his own family estates in the Ukraine, dispossessed during the Russian revolution, and became sombre over the grave of his great- grandfather. The scene made you feel the instinct to honour the dead which often drives nationalism, but it didn't explain why people are prepared to kill to do it.