The Not What it Used to Be TV critic, Jeff Mann, braves new show Britannia High and quickly wishes he hadn’t:

It would seem that creativity has rolled out the off-white rag, hoisted it from the highest flagpole, and died ceremoniously on its arse. As far as British TV is concerned anyway.

Anyone who’s brave enough to have read any of this nonsense once and then without so much as a ransom note written in their first-born’s blood, returned to read it again, will probably know that I’ve railed against the saturation of village idiot television on more than one instance in the past.

But last weekend, finding myself once again confined to barracks with a cold, the likes of which has not been seen in mainland Britain since the glory days of the Black Death, I was unfortunate enough to witness some of the tripe first-hand. Force-fed intravenously to me via the life-support machine in the corner of the living room.

Now I would like both myself and those of you taking time out from your busy schedules to read this, to think that I was the cut of chap that would wilfully put himself through all the excruciating crap that pollutes the airwaves so that you don’t have to. Unfortunately I’m not. I lack the necessary cast-iron stomach for the untreated sewage-water that is The X Factor, Hole in the Wall, Little Britain USA, or anything else of their decidedly dodgy ilk – in fact, my views on The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, and Simon Cowell in general, have been well-documented on previous occasion.

But before I’m detained on suspicion of leading you up the garden path, there was something last weekend that managed to steal two minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. I refer to the heavily publicised Britannia High, upon which I drunkenly stumbled last Sunday evening.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

Don’t be fooled. There’s officially bugger all on TV nowadays.

Beneath all the fluff, fanfare, gloss and tinsel, there’s nothing worth prising yourself away from the festering imprint your backside has left in the sofa to switch the television on for. But then, the devilry that is the remote control means you don’t even have to do that.

I fondly recall a time when you not only had to vacate your seat to turn the TV on, but to change the channel too. And we only had three of the swines to choose from. BBC1, BBC2, ITV. Try and imagine that in these enlightened times of couch spuddism.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

There was a time when you knew where you stood with the common or garden village idiot. He (for they were invariably always male) would sit on his wall at the edge of the village watching the world go by in blissful ignorance, only stopping every once in a while to fall off.

But nowadays, it would seem, the tranquil pace of village life and the occasional loaf of gratis stale bread are not enough. For the villages are missing their idiots en masse.

So what evil has lured the idiot away from the safety of his wall and thatched-roof cottage upon the village perimeter? Well it would seem that like moths to a living room lamp on an unbearably hot day, the village idiot is being drawn to the deceitfully bright lights of television.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…