Just because you’re beautiful and famous and rich, it doesn’t mean you’re interesting. That’s the main life lesson that was driven home by the first episode of the new talk show in town, Vogue BFFs on Colors Infinity. You would think it would be interesting, going by the celebrity being interviewed. But after watching the entire episode, I can safely say that Suniel Shetty would have been more fun to listen to.

Vogue BFFs is hosted by the utterly gorgeous Kamal Sidhu, who still has her TV host chops about her. I’m assuming Colors Infinity came up with the concept of Vogue BFFs to fill the Koffee With Karan-sized hole in our lives and in TV channels’ earnings. The main difference though, between the two shows, is that Karan Johar is an insider, friends with most of those he interviews and also one of Bollywood’s top directors in whose films many of his interviewees have acted. It’s a critical difference: Sidhu is as much an outsider as Johar is an insider, although that shouldn’t stop people from loosening up. Or so you’d hope.

The show’s promo promised us celebrities and their BFFs (‘best friends forever’ or ‘best fucking friends’, depending on how PG-13 you like your terminology) from the fashion industry. Why the fashion industry? Because the show’s prime sponsor is Conde Nast’s magazine Vogue, and why shouldn’t they stay true to their creed? This is a first for a magazine like Vogue. Before this, the only magazine to have sponsored TV programmes was Femina with the Miss India pageant. And let’s be fair: that is so much more than a TV programme. It is a celebration of beauty, vacuity and pretty maids in a row.

Vogue, it seemed, decided not to break the mould and therefore, gave us an hour – which seemed far longer – of utter boredom. Sidhu was the only spark of intelligence and wit in the episode, but even she looked like she was wilting by the end.

The first episode featured Deepika Padukone, looking like a million bucks, accompanied by her BFF from the fashion world, Anahita Shroff Adajania, who just happens to be Vogue’s Fashion Director. The set is supposedly Sidhu’s, home into which she invites her guests. It is very tastefully done, as you would expect a Conde Nast-selected location, sorry, home to be. The conversation, not so much.

The episode was supposed to reveal secrets about Padukone that we didn’t know, but who knew beauty could be so boring?

Shroff is a stylist and styles Padukone. It’s a very important job because it requires you put together what clothes, hairdo, makeup a star will wear not just on screen, but also for occasions when they appear in public as themselves. Like at award ceremonies, red-carpet events and yes, TV shows. One of the few virtues of a show like Vogue BFFs is that it puts a face to stylists and designers and makeup artistes, who don’t get as much publicity as the stars they dress and clean up.

So what was the show all about and what secrets did we find out about Padukone? She likes eating a lot of food, prefers a minimalist style and loves wearing red lipstick. She refused to say whether Ranbir Kapoor or Ranveer Singh is the better dancer, she has a long layered haircut, and feels good to see she’s evolved in the last 10 years. Shocking revelations, no? There was a segment where Padukone and Shroff Adajania blind-tasted food like gherkins and zucchini and karela smoothies – this was a “signature Vogue game” apparently. Then there was some staring at photographs, and Padukone’s clothes were discussed in detail. And oh yes, Padukone and Adajania told us about the first time they’d both met. And that Vin Diesel is a really nice human being, even though Padukone had thought he’d be mean – which may well have been more revealing about Padukone than the show intended (you’d think an actor would know about the difference between onscreen and off-screen persona). And guess what? Padukone’s styling a line of clothes for Myntra, which just happens to be a co-sponsor of the show.

Some of the most charismatic actresses like Suchitra Sen, Greta Garbo and Lauren Bacall, were known for being reclusive and if there’s one thing that Vogue BFFs revealed, then it is the value of remaining an enigma to audiences. This show effectively took Padukone, the star who spoke of her depression and is the highest paid actress in Bollywood, and took all the dynamism out of her. At the end of Vogue BFFs, you realise that just because someone is beautiful, it doesn’t mean they can’t be mind-numbingly boring. An impression aided ably by Adajania’s lack of conversation skills. Pitted against Sidhu’s easy conversational style (which did start looking strained by the end of it), the two seemed to drone on and on. I understand it’s good to plug your magazine’s Fashion Director, but if you must do so, at least make sure she and her BFF aren’t cures for insomnia.

The big question, though, is why Vogue BFFs would go with this as the first episode, especially since the promo of the second episode promises us a very pregnant Kareena Kapoor Khan with designer Manish Malhotra. The 30-second promo was more fun than the entire first episode. How could Vogue not realise that starting the series with a superstar actress who is pregnant and not hiding her belly would work better than the snooze fest they subjected viewers to?

At a time when fashion magazines like Vanity Fair, Femina, Elle and even Vogue are making a concerted editorial effort to carry serious and eloquent writing in their magazines and to take a political and feminist stand between their covers, it’s sad that this programme was as ditzy and blah as it was. Almost driving home the perception that fashion is everything to do with artifice and nothing to do with intellect or spontaneity.   

If you missed episode one, thank your lucky stars. The next episode will air on Saturday, at 9pm, on Colors Infinity.