MEDIUM OF THE MONTH - Quite frankly, Access Hollywood is what publicists' wet dreams are made of, Felix Salmon says. By FELIX SALMON The world of the soft-centred broadcast celebrity profile has finally arrived in the UK with OK!TV. The concept is not completely new in this country - children's music shows have been showing fluffy interviews with pop groups for years. But it's in America that the art of generating TV shows out of publicists' wet dreams has had its apotheosis. Access Hollywood, which has been going strong for four years, has managed to dispense not only with any real reportage or dirt-dishing, it's even managed to lose the pretense that it conducts celebrity interviews. The bite-sized chunks have been cut down to the point where they're often shorter than the ads they are interspersed with, while the information transmitted is rapidly approaching zero. It seems that the best way to present the latest Hollywood starlet is simply to show her smiling on screen - anything she says is almost certain to detract from the impression she gives. The pandering is shameless: a large proportion of the ads in the show are for films that are being plugged within it. It's lowest-common denominator stuff: a desperate attempt to be ironic by getting Tom Hanks's co-stars to slag him off in jest was completely deflated by the necessary words from the anchor at the end of the piece saying that, of course, they were all only kidding, and Hanks is known as one of the nicest and most generous guys. And it's impossible to imagine even OK!TV running a segment breathlessly revealing the new month's Playboy Playmate. But Access Hollywood is certainly the direction in which Hollywood would like television to move, and television, being a Hollywood product itself, is only too happy to follow. (Large chunks of Access Hollywood are already taken up with gameshow hosts or sitcom stars - a case of television plundering its own if Gwyneth Paltrow isn't available to be filmed drinking tea that day.) Watching ads during Access Hollywood is like taking a step back in time - old favourites like Glad waste-bin bags, KFC, Lite FM and Glade Plug-ins, between ads for the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Access Hollywood is not alone in what it does: there's a rival programme called Entertainment Tonight, and a whole cable channel devoted to such stuff called E! TV. But Access Hollywood is, for the moment, the trashiest of them all, and something to which OK!TV will always be able to point to as a show that is much worse than itself. ACCESS HOLLYWOOD FACT FILE Ratings 3-4m viewers Frequency Nightly Produced by NBC Domestic distribution Warner Bros Intl distribution NBC, syndicated only CAMPAIGN 17/12/1999 P25 (Back) to felixsalmon.com