Have you seen that TV programme where an egomaniac convinced he’s cleverer than everyone else travels back in time, saving the world, and often the universe, solely by his own efforts, although occasionally aided by a dozy sidekick?

I follow it avidly. It’s called the “News” and its all about the adventures of this masterful ubermensch called Gordon and his faithful, if rather dim, lapdog Alistair.

Their first adventure saw them travelling back into the early 90s, and the producers behind the series lovingly created a real feel of the time, with massive job losses, plunging house prices and a sterling exchange rate crisis.

The next series was even more ambitious, and like the hit TV programme Life On Mars, was set in the70s. In these episodes, we saw unions flexing their muscles (did you know that cabinet papers used to be sent to the TUC for approval? I read that somewhere and have decided to believe that it’s true), and are constantly going on strike for completely trivial reasons (five minutes off our tea break? All out, comrades), the imposition of massive tax rises to soak the so-called rich and a large slice of the middle classes, and finally the government runs out of money through grotesquely excessesive spending and has to go begging to the IMF for a bail out like some pathetic third world dictatorship.

And in the last planned series, things get even more exciting. At Gordon’s instigation, Alistair gets out his sonic printing press to peel off a few billion pounds we don’t have in order to debauch the currency taking us right the way back to the 1930s and Germany’s Wiemar republic, whereby we need a wheelbarrow to carry the money to buy a loaf of bread, only by the time you get there the bread’s actually going to cost two wheelbarrows of cash to buy. And who know what excitments are in store for any future series they might think up? Back to rooting around in the mud with a stick looking for raw tubers to gnaw? Would keep the greens happy, anyway, although they’ll probably claim that using sticks is raping the earth.