Is this game show (a) nasty (b) cynical or (c) both?

The critics hated it, the viewing figures were "disappointing", and the crass billboard advertising that hailed its arrival is being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority. Boys and Girls, the latest television show from the purported broadcasting genius Chris Evans, has got off to a most inauspicious start.

For Channel 4, which has a great deal riding on the success of this Saturday night entertainment programme, and for Evans himself, for whom it was supposed to signal a triumphant comeback, this is not good news. But for all those who despise the vulgar, boozy, sex and celebrity-obsessed consumerist stupidity that in so many quarters is triumphantly championed and mercilessly exploited, it is. Or it might be.

There can be little doubt that Boys and Girls has been designed to press all the nastiest and most shallow buttons on the mixing desk of popular entertainment. For those unfamiliar with the "format", the programme pits 100 girls against 100 boys, all of whom have to take part in various party games, celebrity greetings, question-and-answer sessions and ritual humiliations, live and shrieking in a television studio, until a winner emerges.

This winner then has to choose a partner of the opposite sex with whom to spend a week and £100,000. This spree in turn is recorded and broadcast, late on the following Friday evening. According to Mr Evans: "Nothing will catalyse a relationship more than having to spend time alone and having to make decisions about spending more money than they ever imagined." Can he really believe this pernicious nonsense? The truth is that this week-long bonding session seems more like the work of a master satirist or crypto-Marxist than that of someone who really believes in the idea that such vapid consumerism underpins meaningful human relationships.

There have been criticisms before of television shows which offer large amounts of money as prizes, from the lottery to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? But in Boys and Girls – which has adopted elements from every successful game show, light entertainment programme, and audience-participation format ever – a nasty twist is added to each borrowed detail.

On this show, the spending of the huge amount of money is part of the game. So each day the winner and their companion – on the first programme it was an 18-year-old girl who did the choosing – are given a prop resembling a golden boiled egg which they must crack open with a teaspoon to receive the instructions inside. The winner is informed of how much money he or she has to spend that day, while the companion is told what restrictions lie upon the spending of the sum.

Last week, for example, the pair were told one day that they had to spend something like £20,000 on items that were red, white or blue. The girl, from Essex, managed to offload some of her money on several pairs of white high heels, and a blue car. The boy, at the end of the day, opined that it had been quite difficult having to contend with the constraints of only being able to buy items in these three colours.

On another day, the pair were told, via the eggs, that they had £40,000 to spend, but that they had to buy items in the correct order so that the first letters of all their purchases spelled out Boys And Girls. This, the pair found, was incredibly demanding. They were chauffeured around London for hours in a panic, wondering what on earth to do. An attempt to buy a bike – an enormous, expensive motorbike of course – failed because neither of them could drive and therefore did not have any insurance documents.

Frantic with the pressure, the two had lunch in order to think of a strategy. The girl told the cameras what a state she was getting into – with £40,000 to spend by the time the shops shut in a few hours, all she could think of beginning with B was bananas, and beginning with O was oranges. Eventually she came up with bra, and headed for Agent Provocateur to purchase a really expensive one, which dealt with the first £40. The hapless couple then went on to purchase an orange and a yoghurt before they realised that S is for stereo and visited Bang and Olufsen, where many thousands of pounds were quickly dumped. So it went on.

The oddest thing, though, was that the two people compelled to take part in these inane exercises in consumer folly came across as modest and innocent, victims of a system decreed by the brainboxes at Channel 4 that was gross and careless and cruel. They bought things for their family – a £14,000 kitchen for the girl's mother, a fancy guitar amp for her brother. The young man explained how he was resisting the temptation to buy things for himself, because he didn't want to be seen as a scrounger or a freeloader.

The two were not ripe to be corrupted by their task, they were instead overwhelmed by it, and reluctantly aware themselves that they were doing something senseless and distasteful. The kind of anguish the couple suffered, as they found themselves struggling to get rid of all this unearned cash, was reminiscent of the atmosphere close to Christmas, when grim people circle round shops attempting to buy items they don't really want for people who don't really want them.

For the viewer – or this one at least – the spectacle was sad. It was hard to believe that this whole thing hadn't been conceived precisely in order to display at its most ugly the sickening waste and hysteria that lies at the heart of consumer capitalism. One could see, as the week went relentlessly on, how quickly people get used to spending lots of money on items they'd given a moment's thought to gaining ownership of, and how unsatisfactory, meaningless and endlessly addictive such purchasing is.

As a denouement, after the whole ghastly cycle had been completed, a vote from the audience decreed that the hapless pair could not keep the goods they had purchased. It was like feeding people heroin all week, just so that they could be abandoned to cold turkey at the end of it.

I suppose only time will tell what it is that a couple has to do in order to keep their purchases. Perhaps they need to be more clued-up and arrogant as they approach the shops. Or maybe only that holy grail among live-televisual entertainment providers, genuine sexual intercourse in front of the cameras, will secure final victory. Is that what Evans means when he talks about what "catalyses a relationship". Certainly, as Big Brother has already indicated, such a scenario is not unthinkable.

It is impossible to imagine a line that Evans would not cross in order to promote himself and his endless thirst for wealth and notoriety. Nor is it easy to work out at what point television executives will realise that this man is even more amoral and exploitative than they are. Yet at some point someone is going to have to decide where exactly the "fun" will stop.

This programme surely has to be the most cynical and vulgar television format ever to have been served up as entertainment. Nothing redeems it. And that in itself makes it feel as if a glass ceiling is being reached. Boys And Girls may well become some sort of cultural benchmark. If it is a success, then from here on in, there is no depth to which our culture will not stoop. If it is a failure, we might all be about to come to our senses.

d.orr@independent.co.uk