“But you’re so intelligent,” says The Boyfriend, “I just don’t understand.” This is his daily refrain when I flick on my Sky+’d edition of Loose Women (on ITV1, 12.30pm, weekdays) and watch, rather classily I feel, over dinner with a flagon of Chardonnay.

This exposes two things: firstly The Boyfriend truly does love me because anyone who spends more than a nanosecond in my company knows I’m all bluff and no brains and, secondly, daytime telly is still subject to the most pernicious snootery, akin only to the sort of treatment the Edwardians reserved for the hired help. T

he problem is TV during daylight hours is eternally deemed as something only chumps with stamp-size intellects can derive any enjoyment, entertainment or satiation from. But we’re not talking Jeremy-Kyle-toothless-yokel territory here. Loose Women is different.

For non-daytimers, of which there are many – a mate said recently he’d never heard of it; he’s dead to me now – Loose Women is an all-female (duh) discussion show whereby a rotating roster of panellists pick over a gamut of pressing topics. What raises this above the standard-issue gobs-on-sticks grandstanding is the fact it isn’t some po-faced, patronising lecture about the big issues of the day; it’s a conversation.

The agenda is anti-elitist and, unlike most commentariat debatefests, genuinely egalitarian, which is why the intelligentsia get so sniffy about it. It has no interest in taking the excluding highbrow road. It’s all about audience inclusiveness, not Newsnight seriousness, its MO mixing the light with life’s heavy load.

Hence the flak flung in its direction. Because in order to chew over meaty subjects, the boffin chatterati decrees the brow must be Melvyn Bragg furrowed and the chin Bamber Gascoigne stroked. Laughter is most definitely not on the table. Master debaters can’t see the merit of four women talking about snoring one minute and the state of the nation the next. They feel it cheapens what’s said, laces everything with a little too much levity.

Most pertinently, though, it’s one of the few shows that’s oestrogen-dominated, which is unusual in any field bar prostitution. Surely, that has nothing to do with it. After all, we’re all equal-oppers untroubled by sexism these days. Aren’t we?

Loose Women is shown on ITV1, weekdays, at 12.30pm. Find out more at www.itv.com.

Want more? Buy Loose Women panellist Jane McDonald's CD Because You Loved Me online now. You'll save some money to put towards her album You Belong to Me: A Salute to the Great Ladies of Song.