2001-07-28 - 5:11 p.m.

�By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising�.kill yourselves. Just planting seeds. There�s no joke here. Seriously. Kill yourself.�

So finally the 9 week national mental vacation that is Big Brother being on TV has come to a predictably underwhelming end. Irish homosexual Brian is the �winner� of the unswervingly tedious televisual vacuity, the losers crowding round the stage, desperately snuffling their snouts in the suddenly shallow trough of quickly waning minor celebrity. I�m not being an intellectual / cultural snob here�it�s just that the programme fails to deliver on its basic premise. We do not have 24-hour uncensored surveillance � we get heavily edited and sanitised blandness. If we�re gonna do this, let�s at least do it properly � drugs, fighting, handjobs. That kind of thing. Brian had just �come out� to his parents before going into the house, though given he was the campest air steward since Moses, I can�t imagine the shock would have troubled the Richter Scale too much.

Apropos of this, witness the bovine hysteria over the most important programme of the year , Chris Morris� genius satire on media reactions to paedophilia. Once again, a nation proves its room temperature IQ by entirely missing the point.

�There is no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan�s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now.�

The b-day shindig turned out to involve hi-jacking a former object of affection�s party, since she had the commendable good taste to be born on the same day. That�s where her taste ends, though, as she�s seemingly formed some sort of attachment to a dysfunctional rat boy who delights in treating her like shit in public and who repeatedly displayed some of the most needlessly offensive behaviour it�s ever been my severe displeasure to witness. Even for someone involved in merchant banking, he was pretty much a complete shit. Being very much over her, I write with consummate objectivity. Astonishing, isn�t it, the choices people make?

Now, I�m no stranger to dancefloor embarrassment, but my rhythmic shortcomings were cruelly exposed � admittedly I was at an advanced stage of alcoholic refreshment, but that�s usually when I�m at my most coordinated (or at least, I stop caring about my lack of coordination). Such was my lack of ability to get to grips with even rudimentary choreography that acquaintances were forced to disown me, though by the end I had redeemed myself slightly. Ratboy was too busy trying to look bored to do anything as demeaning as dancing with people who earn less than a tenth of his own income. Nouveau-riche ennui isn�t just something you can just fake � you have to put the hours in. The evening took an unsurprisingly hazy turn from then on, though I do remember drinking red wine from an overly-ornate receptacle which, in hindsight, was probably a vase of some kind. Nice to age with dignity, don't you think?

�I know the marketing people are thinking there�s gonna be a joke coming, but there�s no fucking joke. Please. Kill yourself.�

Today�s special guest