TV Highlights

ITV1, Wednesday

The Jeremy Kyle Show

9.25am-10.30am

Party Political Broadcast On Behalf of the Labour Party

6.50pm-7.00pm

Emmerdale

7.00pm-7.30pm

UEFA Champions League: Valencia v Chelsea

7.30pm-10.00pm

News At Ten

10.00pm-10.35pm

Rugby World Cup 2011: Highlights

11.35pm-12.05am

Goodwood Revival 2011

12.05am-1.00am

Daily Mail Hackette On Suicide Alert After Confessing Shame Of Husband’s Unemployability

A Daily Mail freelancer is being kept under 24-hour suicide surveillance in case she decides she can no longer live with the ignominious humiliation of unemployment in her thoroughly middle-class family, especially after revealing her disgrace to 2,000,000 tutting readers.

“We were once a typical Daily Mail family – comfortable, bit dim, not super-rich,” sobbed ‘Jane Simmonds’ [all names have been changed so the neighbours won’t catch on - shame about the photo] in a heartrending description of the unending squalor of unemployment in the stockbroker belt. “Skiing in February, a nice hotel in Italy or Spain in the summer, just the one Freelander because my useless, freeloading husband can squeeze into my old Micra and bloody well like it until he starts paying his way. Just the bare essentials.”

A DFS sofa - this is the real tragedy of unemployment

Jane’s modest lifestyle suddenly came crashing down around her ears, however, on the fateful day her idiot husband’s bosses decided they might actually get some work done if it wasn’t for him zealously clogging up their inboxes with an endless torrent of meaningless strategic-management bollocks.

“Since Andy was made redundant four years ago now, our income has plummeted,” she moaned, as millions of already-tight sphincters clenched in horror. “No more bijou little boutique visits any more - we just have to slum it in off-the-peg tat from M&S - and Emily, Jack and Lucy have had to learn not to hurl the Wii at the telly every time they lose a game, because hardworking mummy can only afford one replacement Wii or TV a month now.”

The final indignity, however, came when her stupid, proletarian parents tactlessly gave her a cheque to help with the cost of the children’s riding and tennis lessons. “I thought about tearing it up, but they’re so shockingly working-class in their habits that they actually check their statements every month,” she shuddered. “When I handed that cheque over to a spiteful little grinning bank monkey, I burst into floods of tears. It was like being raped, I tell you, just like being raped.”

“Why won’t somebody give my useless husband Andy a job?” she wailed. “He’s got a History degree from Cambridge and one of those MBA things, you know, so he really is super-employable. He’s willing to do absolutely any job I can bear to admit to the appalling snobs next door, although maybe his forte isn’t in personnel management. Since he’s been at home to supervise the cleaner, I swear I’m finding more dust on top of the wardrobe, even though she always pretends to look so hot and flustered whenever I get home a bit early.”

Craven Labour Conference Delegates Neglecting To Crucify Ed Balls

The beast must die

George Osborne today lambasted rank-and-file Labour Party members for spinelessly failing to instruct their representatives at the party’s annual conference to string up Ed Balls from the nearest lamp post.

“The implosion of the global economy and, with it, the irreversible decline and fall of Western civilisation, can be laid firmly at the door of one man and one man only,” squeaked the chancellor of the exchequer, “And that man is Ed Balls. Kill it. Kill it now, and maybe the gods of finance will be appeased. Or something. It’s got to be worth a try.”

“Of course, I’ll miss our amusing sparring sessions in the Commons, in which he always contrives to make me look a bit of a charlie even though I’m absolutely right about everything,” he smirked. “But it’s a sacrifice I’m sure I shall learn to get used to.”

Andrew Marr To Lead Mail’s Holy Crusade To Save Christ

The righteous forces of Christian decency, a/k/a the Daily Mail, today proudly announced that the saintly Andrew Marr has seen the light and vowed to join its crusade to rescue their imperilled Lord and Saviour from the wicked BBC.

Mail readers plan to make their views known to the BBC

Archbishop Dacre solemnly warned a shocked world yesterday that “sin-loving cunts” who run the BBC have hatched a dastardly plot to murder Our Lord Jesus Christ by erasing His name from history, replacing the god-fearing ‘Anno Domini’ and ‘Before Christ’ with blasphemous references to some ghastly ‘common’ era which they fervently hope will utterly obliterate all of Our Blessed Lord and Master’s sacred years – erasing Him completely from human history.

“I do solemnly reject the heretic teachings of the BBC and humbly beg Archbishop Dacre’s sweet forgiveness,” grovelled the born-again penitent, prostrating himself before the righteous readers of Middle England. “Amen.”

“Let that awkward business about St. Andrew’s superinjunction concerning the unfortunate spilling of his seed in some non-matrimonial fanny now be cast into outer darkness,” proclaimed the acknowledged spiritual leader of Middle England, rising up and girding himself with the Armour of God, the Sword of Christ and the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. “Come, my devoted flock, and take up arms with us against the vile Mohammedan cunts of Shepherd’s Bush who flagrantly seek to wipe The Holy Lamb of God from the pages of history.”

Labour Tempts Students With Lifetime Of Slightly Less Debt

Miliband 2, the regent of the Labour Party until anyone better comes along, has single-handedly recaptured the youth vote today by dangling the promise of a marginally smaller mountain of crushing debt for future generations of impoverished graduates to defer.

"We're going to get lots of people, talented people, put off from going to university by £9,000 fees,” droned the lesser Miliband, speaking before his party conference begins to address the vexing question of how to differentiate themselves from the other two parties. “But if those fees were slashed to a trifling £6,000 a year, I guarantee they’d be stampeding into higher education.”

Students can barely contain their glee

Miliband 2 went on to dream that his extraordinary munificence would be funded by retaining the current level of corporation tax which his party’s rich corporate friends strenuously avoid paying, and by charging higher interest on the student loans of graduates who stroll into the millions of jobs paying more than £65,000 which exist only in his imagination.

“Let me see now. Under the Conservatives, I’m going to have to hack away an impossible £27,000 debt mountain - not counting the interest - before I could even contemplate a mortgage and kids,” said one sixth-former, who is hoping that a good degree in Engineering might one day swing him a part-time job stacking shelves in a supermarket for £6.50 an hour. “But, under Labour, I’d only have to clear an impossible £18,000? Please excuse my tears of gratitude.”

“This is a truly fantastic deal for students,” smiled utterly independent NUS President and Labour Party member Liam Burns, through gritted teeth. “Vote Labour.”

Tired Old Spitting Image Jokes Revisited

Dr Liam Fox’s Birthday Party
Fox: What would you like to eat, Dave?
Cameron: I’ll have the steak.
Fox: How would you like it?
Cameron: Lean. (sobs) Very, very lean.
Fox: And what about the vegetables?
Cameron: You and Mrs Thatcher will have the same as me.

Dummy To Hand Russia Back To Ventriloquist

Global audiences were reduced to tears of laughter today by the familiar comedy antics of top ventriloquist Vladimir Putin and his hapless dummy, Little Dmitry, as they performed their hilarious slapstick routine, Pass The Russia.

Mr Vladimir's 'cold hands' gag always raises a laugh

A key part of the act is the in-joke of both ventriloquist and dummy speaking with exactly the same voice, and generations have enjoyed the long-running spectacle of the dummy pretending to exchange roles with ‘Mr Vladimir’ – who somehow always contrives to keep the neatly-wrapped parcel firmly within his grasp.

Audiences also fall off their chairs laughing at Mr Vladimir’s silly adventures, in which he entrusts Little Dmitry with the boring, everyday task of locking up all the other would-be entertainers while he pretends to be Action Man - wrestling bare-chested with children, horses, polar bears, tigers, even whales and dolphins, and generally making a fool of himself with his toy jets, mini-subs and racing cars.

“I want to thank you, Little Dmitry, for the positive reaction to the proposal for me to sit on your lap for a few years,” Mr Vladimir told his blank-faced dummy, to gales of helpless laughter. “For 143 million Russians, this is a great honour - and besides, I’m sick of pulling splinters out of my knee from your wooden bum.”

Nice, Short Booker Choices Selling Well

Sales of the entries shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker literary award are booming, according to booksellers, who point to the appealing narrowness of the books’ spines as the major attraction to readers.

That thin one on the bottom will do just fine, thanks

“This year, like the typical reader, we judges are all far, far too busy getting on with our gorgeous lives to read some overwritten cod-philosophical twaddle the size of a housebrick,” said ex-spy chief Dame Stella Rimington, before she was distracted by a bird flying past the window.

Bookmakers say that the award will almost certainly go to the author who has made the least demands on the panel’s easily-distracted minds, which makes Julian Barnes’ slender 146-page effort odds-on favourite to win.

“Like several other contenders this year, Barnes has shamelessly pinched half his plot from the undemanding murder-mystery genre, which is really all anyone can be bothered to read nowadays. That’s got to help,” explained a spokesman for Betfred whose job cruelly forces him to read all six shortlisted books from cover to cover. “Hopefully next year they’ll allow puzzle magazines and TV listing guides in. Then I can do the lot in an afternoon.”

World ‘Not Quite Fucked Yet,’ Cameron Reassures Canadians

Standing statesmanlike with his hands on his knees and naked from the waist down, David Cameron stoically warned Canada’s impassive parliamentarians that the entire Western world was “not quite fucked yet, but the pattern is clear.”

With global share prices in freefall as the unchecked forces of capitalism threw themselves into their final orgy of cannibalistic destruction – as predicted 144 years ago by some long-forgotten oddball with a beard - Britain’s PM issued a stark warning to the leaders of Europe and the United States in which he desperately urged them to discard a century of ill-considered legislation which prevents the remnants of Western industry from regarding you and your children solely as disposable raw materials to be exploited ruthlessly until death.

Western civilisation will be back after this break

With the G20 summit of the world’s former leading economies scheduled for November, the trouserless Mr Cameron expressed a touching hope that the impending sideways shafting by barbarians in suits would at least have the decency to wait until then before laying waste to a thousand years of Western civilisation.

“This is why it is so important for the United Nations to support the embryonic spread of democracy in the Arab world," he added. “Then, after the new Dark Age has reduced us to cooking dung in our mud huts and throwing sharp sticks at the tribe from the next hilltop, we may one day rise up and steal all that we forgot back off them like we did before.”

NASA: Plummeting Six-Ton Satellite Will Only Kill 2,250,000

Considerably fewer than 3m people will be crushed to pulp by fragments of the tumbling ARSE satellite when it crashes to earth later today, according to reassuring calculations issued by top NASA gamblers.

It's fairly possible that this might not happen

“Yes, folks, there’s just one chance in 3,200 that you will be flattened by a red-hot, refrigerator-sized chunk of ARSE!” beamed Dr Randy von Braun from a bunker deep under Texas. “With seven billion potential targets out there, our new supercalculators confidently predict that 6.9775 billion of you have absolutely nothing to fear.”

Dr von Braun helpfully explained that the actual toll might be affected by a small degree of statistical variance, according to whether the larger chunks of flaming wreckage hurtled into the sparsely-populated Southern Ocean or a nuclear reactor close to a major metropolis.

“Er… whoops, that should be 6.99775 billion,” he added sheepishly. “Hey, you’d think I’d have picked up something from that Math 101 refresher they sent me on after the Mars Orbiter went AWOL because I forgot you guys in Europe are metric, wouldn’t you? Live and learn – well, unless you die tonight, but it probably won’t happen. Trust me. No, really. I’m hardly ever wrong.”