Brace yourselves luddites: the future is here. Gone are the days when a puppet with wonky eyes or a man in a dodgy wig could be used to impersonate or send up celebrities. Now we have technology to graft the actual faces of the rich and famous onto actors’ bodies, with the aim of making them get up to preposterous and incongruous hi-jinks for our entertainment. 

The premise here is that we see celebrities transformed using deep fake technology into ‘normal people’ and put into the kind of petty, neighbourly squabbles that are catnip to reality TV producers. In episode one, gardening-obsessive ‘Idris Elba’ is annoyed when bus driver ‘Kim Kardashian’ leaves her sun loungers on his carefully tended lawn. Meanwhile, single mother ‘Greta Thunberg’ is appalled by next-door neighbours ‘Conor McGregor’ and ‘Ariana Grande’ who festoon their house with Christmas decorations in July.   

There are some choice moments: ‘Thunberg’ calling her baby Algae, or ‘Elba’ selling homemade perfume on Etsy. But the humour seems to punch down an awful lot. When we are invited to laugh at ‘Kardashian’ and her pride over finally having the bus route she really wanted, or at ‘Thunberg’ in a baggy t-shirt pushing a buggy, who are we really laughing at? The privileged celebrity? Or the working-class, economically disadvantaged people they’re being made to imitate?

In a cost-of-living crisis, it sits particularly queasily. Why wouldn’t it have been enough to have the celebrities deep-faked as themselves (instead of as avatars of ‘everyday people’) and forced to deal with petty scenarios? The trouble with Deep Fake Neighbour Wars is not with the ethics of the tech at all; it’s with the choice of target. 

All episodes available on ITVX now.