Meet Dior, Dolce and Gabbana — pampered stars of the dog walk

Here’s a cracking cracker gag. What do you call a woman who is a slave to her pampered budgies, Versace, Miyake, McQueen and Louis Vuitton? Wait for it . . .

A fashion victim! Oh, please yourselves. But doting pet-lover rachel in the Midlands really has devoted her life to a menagerie of animals with names plucked from haute couture. Apart from the birds, she has three blissfully spoiled shih-tzus — Dior, Dolce and Gabbana.

Designer dogs in every sense, the trio expected only the best, on The Supervet At Christmas (C4). And they weren’t disappointed, riding to the park for their walkies in a customised pram, then back home for a shampoo and set.

Honestly, there are sultans and billionaires that have harder lives than many of our cosseted pets.

But even the most luxurious existence is no guarantee of perfect health, and poor Gabbana’s back legs were going. A series of scans at Professor Noel Fitzpatrick’s hightech hospital for animals revealed that her spine was in bad shape.

The discs had dried up, with the liquid between the bones squeezed out, as he put it, like the jam from squashed doughnuts.

One of the reliably interesting elements of this long-running show is the way Noel explains each op. His clear, short summaries help us understand why, for instance, Bran the three-legged Alsatian has a displaced hip, or how Lexi the French bulldog pup’s encounter with next-door’s dog has left her with more than bite-marks.

Added to this, the series now uses 3D computer graphics to illustrate where Noel’s revolutionary titanium prostheses will fit and which muscles he’ll have to peel back — useful, if you’re the squeamish sort who covers your eyes when the scalpel comes out.

A confession: years ago, after I interviewed Noel at his practice, he invited me to watch stomach surgery on a spaniel. reader, I suddenly remembered I had a train to catch.

For sheer blood and guts, though, The supervet was no match for the women of Inside The Cage (BBC1), beating each other to a pulp in mixed martial-arts bouts.

In the first fight, we saw Liverpudlian scrapper Molly ‘Meatball’ McCann defeat her opponent even though she’d suffered a fracture to the facial bones that left her with an eye like a black golf ball. As the women pinned each other to the canvas and slammed their elbows into each others’ teeth and noses, the only wonder was that fighters don’t inflict these injuries in every round — and that people aren’t killed most nights.

Presenter Annie Price was no sports reporter. ‘Ooh!’ she squealed, spotting Meatball’s cabinet of trophies and belts, ‘look at the badges.’

But Annie’s good at asking direct questions, and homing in on evasions.

Molly might be able to lay out a rival twice her size with one roundhouse kick, but she confessed everything under Annie’s interrogation — how her mother’s struggle with drug addiction gave her the hunger to fight, and how she has to train for such relentlessly long hours that she earns, in effect, less than the minimum wage.

someone is earning a lot more than that, because tickets for these all-female fights can sell for upwards of £250 — and that’s before the pay-per-view TV earnings are totted up.

All the attention was on the fighters . . such as teenager Cory, a bookworm with the qualifications to go to university.

Who collects the profits, and why the women don’t have agents and promoters to protect their interests, wasn’t explained. This felt like only half the story.