Shilpa hits all the wrong notes

Shilpa Shetty hits all the wrong notes in Miss Bollywood

Given the anguish and humiliation that Shilpa Shetty suffered in the Celebrity Big Brother house earlier this year, the British public is probably prepared to forgive her almost anything. Even so, she's pushing her luck with this shoddy piece of opportunism. Our admiration for the grace and generosity with which Shetty stood up to Jade Goody and her ignorant, xenophobic cronies made a winner and a heroine of the Bollywood actress. But this ill-conceived, half-baked star vehicle does her - and us - no favours.

Scripted by Niranjan Iyengar, a Bollywood screenwriter, and directed by Cineyug Entertainment and Michael E. Ward, the show blatantly exploits Shetty's CBB ordeal. She could have seized the opportunity to reveal the talent behind the controversy. Instead, Shetty is content to reprise her reality television role as proud, injured innocent, to deliver knowing jokes about her unsolicited lip-locking encounter with Richard Gere and her CBB incarceration ("I've learnt that life can't all be Goody Goody") and to spout platitudes about extending the hand of friendship, even to her malefactors, across cultural frontiers.

Shetty certainly looks stunning, her body all muscular femininity, skin and hair gleaming. Her first appearance on stage - dressed in a mid-riff revealing, sparkly orange outfit - prompted whoops of excitement on opening night in Manchester. When Shetty wasn't undulating her killer curves, though, impatient shuffling and muttering set in.

Anyone who wasn't paying attention between numbers - a selection of hits from Bollywood movies - didn't miss much. The preposterous plot, set in London in the near future, pivots on the conflict between an Indian dance teacher, Maya (Shetty), whose premises are under threat from the Olympic building programme, and a duplicitous Westernised impresario who wants Maya to add Indian spice to his company, so that he can claim cultural diversity and win a spot at the Mayor's Trafalgar Square gala. There are also Maya's profoundly irritating neighbours - a little girl whose good sense always saves the day and her father and uncle, a tooth-grindingly unfunny double act; and a beefy-but-sensitive love interest.

Needless to say, the spirit of togetherness triumphs in the end. Of course, far-fetched stories, overblown production numbers and sentimentality are all part of Bollywood's appeal. But where The Merchants of Bollywood, last year's touring dance-theatre extravaganza, thrilled with the scale, sparkle and slickness of its gaudy spectacle, this show is lacklustre. Ganesh Hegde's choreography is snappy and the dancers are well drilled, but they're also mechanical; the script is diabolical, the acting amateurish and no amount of dry ice can disguise the fact that Neeta Lulla and Shiraz Siddiqui's costumes look nastily cheap.

It all lacks brio and excitement and though she is regally elegant to the last, Shetty alone isn't enough to make it worthwhile. It's a great shame that, having endured the Celebrity Big Brother debacle with such impeccable dignity, she should go on to capitalise on the experience with a substandard project that reeks of cynicism.