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footmen. Nip off for a crap and chances are there’s a cap-doffing peasant stationed by the bowl, punching himself in the face with pride as he wipes your bum, pulls the chain and holds a sprig of lavender under your nose till the stink fades away.
    Just when you think things can’t get any worse, you’re treated to the sight of Queen and Co. sitting down to enjoy some modest after-dinner entertainment—the musical Les Misfrables , transplanted in its entirety from the West End to one of Windsor Castle’s 8,000 drawing rooms. And what’s that the cast are singing? Why, it’s a song about the miserable lot of the underclass: ‘At the end of the day you’re another day older / And that’s all you can say for the life of the poor…Keep on grafting as long as you’re able/ Keep on grafting till you drop’—all of which plays out over footage of the staff frenziedly washing dishes and licking the bog floor clean with their tongues.
    Here’s hoping the series ends with the castle burning down a second time. While the staff get pissed and polish off the wine cellar.

Show us your bum for ten pence
    [2 April 2005]
    T ravelling at 7,000 MPH , 22,000 miles above our heads, a satellite orbits the Earth, beaming a signal to the dish on your roof. This signal then travels down a fibre-optic cable to a receiver which unscrambles the image and sends it to your TV set, which in turn paints it on the screen, line by line, 15,000 times a second, fast enough for your brain to register as a moving image.
    All this, just so you can watch girls waving their bums around on shows like Babestation (about a million different satellite stations, nightly).
    Have you seen Babestation? If you’ve got a satellite dish, that’s a stupid question—you can’t miss it. Go randomly channel-surfing any time after 10 PM and you’ll bump into more Babestation variants than you can shake a stick at. If you catch my drift.
    In case you don’t, here’s what I’m talking about: Babestation is a bit of night-time ‘adult fun’ (i.e. pornography) consisting of several inset windows. One houses live footage of thick girls in various states of undress. Below that lies another window full of texts from even thicker viewers, begging them to blow kisses and jiggle about a bit. Sending the texts cost a fortune, and that’s why Babestation is there. It’s a coin-operated wanking machine, in other words, and it’s just as glamorous as that sounds.
    Other stations house coundess spin-off variants on this theme: generally dingy webcam footage of girls in rooms as small as coffin interiors, chatting to viewers on premium-rate phone lines.
    Grimmest of these is the alarming Babestation Contacts , which displays phone-camera snaps of sagging viewers accompanied by voicemail messages encouraging you to get in touch, come round and muck about with them.
    This is almost enough to signal the end of civilisation as we know it, which is currently scheduled to occur the day a major network broadcasts a show I’ve recently invented called Show Us Your Bum for Ten Pence-a four-hour live broadcast in which viewers nationwide are encouraged to send in phone snaps of their backsides in exchange for a lop discount on their next mobile bill. Scoff all you like, but I guarantee it’ll be on air within a decade.
    Anyway: Babestation— it’s seedy and gooey and yucky and bluurgh, but even so, it’s nowhere near as puke-inducing as one of its daytime equivalents, the truly hideous Psychic Interactive . The name gives it away—yes, it’s another bit of coin-slot bummery, this time aimed at the desperate and gullible (as opposed to the desperate and masturbating).
    Psychic Interactive offers a range of services, from premium-rate one-to-one ‘sessions’ with on-air mystics to text-window Tarot readings courtesy of dowdy bags in the studio. People text in to discover whether their relationships will survive, or their job prospects will improve…even to find out