If television is the idiot's lantern then the subjective opinions of someone unqualified to write about it must surely be the idiot's lectern.

The Ultimate Fighter

Mondays at 10pm on Bravo

The format the Ultimate Fighter is pretty simple. You take sixteen boneheaded but extremely athletic men in their early twenties, keep them in a house in Las Vegas for six weeks, have them train with some of the best fighters in the world and one by one they have fights and the losers are eliminated. Eventually you get down to the last two and then a winner. It’s almost like the plot of an 80s movie with embarrassing hair and far too much body oil but it is real and it is happening right now. This is the sixth season of T.U.F. and its proved a solid if unspectacular ratings success for Spike TV – the channel once sued by Spike Lee for infringing on what he assumed was his intellectual property but which turned out to be a word in common use even before he was born.

This season the gimmick is that the sixteen fighters are split into teams coached by the current champion, Matt "The Terror" Serra, and the man he will fight in December (on pay-per-view naturally), Matt "Doesn’t have a Nickname" Hughes. The two don’t like each other and at least once a week we’ll hear Serra – the shorter and squatter of two short and squat men – unleash an expletive filled diatribe about how much he hates Matt Hughes. This week it centred around Hughes’s interesting decision to hand his boneheaded fighters a Bible each and ask them to read it. Hughes believed himself to be one of the characters and it was down to his boys to say which it was. It turned out to be some Queen or other who did good works. That’s Matt Hughes – always doing good deeds. Or something. Anyway, it annoyed Matt Serra and that makes for good TV.

The goodness of the TV is helped immeasurably by the show being uncensored. There is a lot of swearing and Bravo (I can’t speak for Spike TV) air it without any bleeps or sound drops. This is because we are adults and no amount of fucking or cocksuckering is going to make us blench. It may make us tired and flushed if done right but we won’t blench. It isn’t just the boneheaded fighters who swear like rappers – UFC President, Dana White makes sure every sentence contains at least one word Simon Bates would describe as a "sexual swearword".

The other drama in this week’s episode revolved around one of the fighters – Joey I think his name was. The thing with TUF is that you get introduced to sixteen new boneheaded fighters in one go and it takes about fourteen of the show’s twelve weeks before you can tell one from another. Joey lost his fight in the first episode of the season and was moping about it. The last time I watched TUF – season three it would be – the losers were chucked out of the house and not seen again unless someone got injured and they needed a replacement. This time the losers stick around which is nice – it adds a bit of cruelty to the show. Joey wanted to call his girlfriend and Coach Serra had to tell him it was against the rules. The boneheaded fighters are in the house and can have no contact with the outside world. We might sympathise with Joey but he banged on about this girl to anyone who would listen, alternately telling people that she was "the one" and that he was going to propose to her, and that he hoped she wasn’t doing "something stupid" without him and wasn’t "fucking around". What a great basis for married life – he’s away for a week and she’s entertaining gentlemen like its going out of fashion. It’s nice to know that Joey is capable of loving a woman without respecting or trusting her in the slightest. Anyway, I don’t think he’s long for this show.

The show ended with the traditional fight. The first show saw Team Hughes win and I was backing their fighter because he was the only vegetarian in the house. He was called Mac which was confusing in a show with two Matts at the helm. This week there was another Matt fighting and he won (which pleased me as I was supporting Team Serra this week). Actually, he didn’t just win he really won. I don’t know where they get these fighters from – people who send in videos of themselves fighting on indie shows I guess – but the loser of this fight looked totally out of his depth.

The genius of The Ultimate Fighter is that it takes a very simple concept and, through clever editing and a thorough knowledge of how to turn footage into a story, takes what is essentially sixteen boneheads in a gym into a compelling hour of television each week. This isn’t Big Brother where the contestants just have to sit around and not upset anyone long enough to win some money. These are young men with a degree of talent, a heck of a work ethic and, most televisually of all, a dream. Week by week we get to know them and discover that they are more than just boneheaded fighters. Some of them are boneheaded people too.

There are better places to go to watch fighting, there are better places to go to understand about people but there is nowhere better to understand about people who fight. Next week’s show apparently involves them all getting drunk and trashing their Las Vegas house. Did I mention that they’re all boneheads?