Obvious Jokes

On Friday nights millions of people, including myself, avoid Channel Four television like the plague. You might even be one of us. For the mere thought, let alone sight or sound, of its flagship 'comedy' programme is enough to set off in us a frenzy of nihilistic suicide impulse. This programme is, of course, The Friday Night Project, presented by the dire Justin Lee Collins and his sidekick Alan Carr. It is comedy for Big Brother fans, too lazy to switch over; television for fans of tripe from Jordan and Fightstar.

And so, it is with interest that I come across this news story on BBC online. As they were completing the filming of a new TV series, Lionel Blair and Alan Carr came across a man attempting suicide by leaping off Blackpool Pier. "By the time the entertainers reached the end of the pier," according to the BBC, "the man was holding on by his fingertips, but they managed to grab him."

They told him: 'Come on, you don't want to die. You can't do that. Listen to us'. And the reaction of this man to his miraculous divine intervention, given a second chance that so few in his tragic position recieve - his cry for help answered at the last possible moment?

"He did a double take, but then said, 'No I want to go'." Quite.

But he wasn't getting away that easily: " So I [Blair] got one arm and you [Carr] got the other." The man is now back at home with his family, where, one assumes, his previous problems will fade into insignificance when the night terrors featuring Carr and Blair begin. Perhaps he will rethink his life; lead a life of utter moral purity for fear that does he leave this world, the faces of Carr and Blair will meet with him again.