Stuart Heritage's Screen burn

'It starts off cheerily enough, if you find a man becoming impaled on a broomstick cheery'
Screen burn
You might as well sweep up while you're at it. Still from My Daughter Grew Another Head And Other True Life Stories. PR

Want a slightly depressing anecdote about my expectations of British television? No? Well tough, because you're getting one. When I first heard about next week's My Daughter Grew Another Head And Other True Life Stories (Thu, 9pm, C4), my first instinct was that it'd be another one of those ghoulish medical shows. "Pah," I thought, "it won't be a patch on My Biscuit Skull or The Boy Who Shits Fireworks."

But it's actually a behind-the-scenes look at some of the country's leading "real life" magazines. You know the ones: the gaudy, shrieking, female-targeted magazines that cost 70p and are called things like That's Life! and Love It! and Pick Me Up! and Give Me Approval! They're the magazines that give women everything they could ever want: crosswords, competitions, harrowing tales of real-life tragedy delivered in such a grotesquely sensational manner that they'd make Jerry Springer feel bruised and emasculated in comparison. That sort of thing.

These magazines use the term "real life" loosely. If I were to base a magazine on my own real life, it'd be full of headlines like I Think This Milk's Gone Off But I'm Not Completely Sure, and Gosh! What An Unusually Deep Puddle. But these mags deal with the other side of real life, the side where the word "real" is substituted for the word "overstated" and "life" is substituted for "bollocks".

Take the cover of this week's Pick Me Up!, for example. The main story is a piece on the Charla Nash case, but here it's reduced to the headline "MUTILATED By My Boss's Drug Addict CHIMP". Worse is the picture of Jeremy Kyle's disembodied head floating above it, accompanied by the caption "YOU MADAM ARE A DISGRACE". Maybe Kyle does that on every cover, just to keep the readers tearful and afraid enough to stay loyal, like an abusive husband.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, My Daughter Grew Another Head isn't in love with its subject matter. It starts off cheerily enough – if you consider the sight of a man staging a reconstruction of the time he became impaled on a broomstick to be cheery – but it isn't long before the darker side emerges. Stories get binned because they can't be boiled down to ludicrous five-word headlines. Transsexuals burst into tears because they've been made to look cartoonish. People recount the absolute worst moment of their entire lives in heartbreaking detail, only for a journalist to smash it down into two pages of lowest common denominator schlock immediately afterwards.

The argument is that these magazines exploit the vulnerable, which they certainly do in terms of payment. Readers often submit their stories through third-party websites, and they're usually chucked a pitiful amount of cash in return. During My Daughter Grew Another Head I calculated what it'd take to earn a month's wages this way. Turns out I'd need to have internal parasites, a syndrome that made me fall unconscious whenever I laughed, a cannibal for a best friend, the ability to give birth to babies with respiratory conditions whenever I wanted and several hundred broomsticks constantly lodged within my rectum. I could probably only achieve half of that – I'd die of poverty.

But there's a lighter side to these magazines too, and that's covered in the remarkably similar Secrets For Sale (Tue, 10.35pm, BBC1). It follows two months in the life of the Real People magazine offices. It's not as revelatory as the Channel 4 film, but it's definitely worth tuning in for – if only to see the magazine's editor Samm Taylor, who has a passing resemblance to Elton John.

Whatever your opinion, you can't argue with how successful real-life magazines are. Almost a million people read Take A Break every week, which is incredible given the hopeless state of publishing at the moment. That's why next week's Screen Burn will be replaced by a garish piece about an amputee housewife who had a heart attack when she caught her husband fingering a goat. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Charlie Brooker is away