Yet another annoyingly simple but brilliant idea. This time it’s for a Skoda ad airing in Poland, where apparently they have more than one TV station. With advertising and everything. Who’d have thunk it?

Anyway, the ad takes a product benefit – a remote controlled boot (yawn) – and brings it to life in a clever and (slightly) interactive way. I’m guessing the media placement was fairly pricey, but the end result is pretty impactful.

Saturday night’s X-Factor was a beautiful exercise in pure prime-time panto heaven. It had everything – big bad Cowell heaping scorn on the glaringly sub-par performances, pop pixie Cheryl in tears being comforted by a prepubescent Welsh child, Louis completely un-notable by his absence, Danni almost managing to register emotion, Whitney Houston cracked up to the eyeballs…the list goes on.

But the undoubted highlight was the showstopping performance by John and Edward, two of the most obnoxious little upstarts ever to sully the face of this planet.

With hair modeled on a combination of Johnny Bravo and Vanilla Ice, and outfits that could curdle milk, they tackled Oops I Did It Again with a curious combination of arrhythmical dancing and tone-deaf singing. Quite how a pair of twins can display such a total lack of understanding of each other is baffling. But in so doing, managed to completely redefine the phrase, car crash entertainment.

It was in equal parts hideous, hysterical, irreproachable and unfathomable. It was unbridled genius. It was unmissable. It was everything Saturday night TV should be. As Pop Justice described it, it was the moment that light entertainment died, was reborn then ate itself.

These moments don’t come along often, so we should seize them whilst the ironic iron is still hot. Go on, seize it…

This kid is frikkin’ hilarious. I want to adopt him.

Last night saw one of the most extraordinary pieces of television I have ever witnessed. My Monkey Baby could have been a heart-wrenching story of three couples who are unable to have children, and their quest to find something to fill the sadness that these gaping voids have left behind. But no. Instead it was a programme about three sets of Bobby J Hillbillyies and their adopted monkeys, who they paraded around in special monkey nappies for nearly an hour. I had to pinch myself several times to be sure that my eyes weren’t lying to me.

One of the women had had six real children, all of whom clearly had the right idea and had hopped aboard the nearest tractor out of there and not spoken to her for a decade. Couple this with the lingering shots of a long-unused swing in her garden and her husband sat in his garage on his own with a can of beer, and you pretty much had all the pieces to a smothering control freak of a mother jigsaw. Any hint of sympathy that she might have curried with the audience disappeared the second that their wedding photo, complete with the ever-popular monkey-as-bridesmaid, was shown. And have you ever wondered what a monkey would look like in a dress with lippy and eye shadow? Well, look no further.

Honest to God, I spent the entire show torn between getting angry at society for letting such an abomination happen, being unbelieveably creeped-out by the whole thing, and holding back tears of unrestrained laughter.

Next up was a hippy who lived with six monkeys, one of whom (named ‘Silly Willy‘) slept with her whilst her husband was confined to the spare room. At a guess, I’d suggest that most of her co-habiters had larger IQs than her.  And finally there was a young couple who bought a baby monkey for thousands of dollars and had already discussed such life-defining matters as who would get custody of ‘Butters’ should they ever split up in the future.

And to think, all of these people have the power to vote.

I’ve been watching ER since it first sprang onto Channel 4 some 15 years ago, and somewhat worringly that’s just over half of my life. But last week it all came to a dribble of an ending with the final ever episode. And whilst the last series was good in parts, and not so good in others,  it still remained head, shoulders and sternum above all the medical-based TV tripe that we churn out here.

I remember watching Casualty as a kid and being bored senseless by Charlie – the blandest man in history – and the rest of the tedious cast, week after soul-draining week. The only highlight was playing the ‘dead game’ during the opening credits, when you guessed which one of the rent-an-extras would cop it first in a freak canal boat accident. And then came Holby City, which at least employed a few good looking people (mainly ex-Hollyoaks) to try and stifle the gaping yawnfest.

In contrast, ER was a cauldron of volcanic intensity. The camerawork was swift, the dialogue snappy and the medical jargon knee-deep. The cast were better-looking, had better storylines, and could act better than their Blighty counterparts. In short, it was simply far, far, better. And when most of the old stalwarts (i.e. the ones that weren’t killed off) reappeared for wallet-bulging cameos in the final series, it was like being reunited with old friends. Hey, there goes John Carter…look, it’s Doctor Ross…Dr Green? Didn’t you die? Oh, it’s a flashback…etc.

So thank you ER for all that you have done. Before, good American drama was hard to find. But since you, we’ve had The West Wing, The Sopranos, The Wire, CSI and 24. You were the pioneer, and shall never be forgotten. Probably.

Eminem being interviewed on German TV.  This is beyond weird.  Starts off with a freestyle whilst the host plays some strange German folk song. And then there’s an interview afterwards which goes from funny to full-on Europainful as the host tries to teach Mr Mathers III some new German swear words. It’s a bit like being on a school exchange, just with a global superstar instead of a spotty teenager called Klaus.