In the interests of remaining well-informed, I sat through the whole two hours of Peter Kay's Britain's Got the Pop Factor-wyllantisiliogogogoch. It looked perfect, but it didn't make me laugh once. As a satire (and some listings billed it as such), it was toothless, with Pete Waterman, Nicki Chapman and Dr Fox (who is, in the words of Lee and Herring, neither a real doctor nor an actual fox) all desperately trying to show how good they are at taking a joke and thus improving their own profiles in the process. As comedy, it was lazy. It seems that they'd spent so much time and effort getting the set right that they had no time to write any actual jokes. Still, we shouldn't be too surprised. Has Peter Kay been any good since he parted company with Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice?

Anyway, I can just about tolerate the existence of bad comedy, but on Monday, 'The Winner's Song' was released as a single. Extensive enquiries have brought forth no indication that the single is a charitable venture. So, it would appear that Channel 4 paid Peter Kay to make a two-hour promo for his own single, the profits from which will be going to buy his mum a bigger garden for her bungalow - I'm told she's got her eye on a little place called Lancashire. If so, am I being hopelessly old-fashioned to think that the whole setup stinks? Even the useless Ofcom must take a dim view of this sort of corruption.