I’m sure Richard Curtis doesn’t really want to kill my children. Well, I say that …

For some time now I’ve had this idea for a running gag in a comedy sketch series.

For some time now I’ve had this idea for a running gag in a comedy sketch series. It would star a character called Unfunny Observational Comic. Each week we’d see him dying a death with his ‘Have you ever noticed…?’ comedy of recognition before an appalled audience. He’d say things like: ‘You know how it is, when you’ve broken into your neighbour’s house to rummage through her knicker drawer…?’ and ‘Gerbils. Just what is it about gerbils that makes us all want to shag ’em?’ The humour would lie, of course, in the Observational Comic’s tragic inability to apprehend the gulf between what he thinks is normal and what everybody else does.

Unfortunately, it’s not going to work any more, a) because I’ve explained the joke, and b) because Richard Curtis has beaten me to it with an accidentally unfunny sketch so awful that even if Little Nell were to toss all her kittens into the yawning mass grave of her entire family on a really sad, grey day when the world was about to end it would be a thousand times more amusing.

Before I explain exactly why it wasn’t funny, let me recap. There’s an environmental pressure group called 10:10 which scored what they innocently imagined was the coup of having Curtis — the comedy genius behind such classics as The Vicar of Dibley and Love, Actually — script their new campaigning video. It was called ‘No Pressure’.

The video — which you can easily find on YouTube, despite belated attempts by the makers to suppress it — opens with a nice, friendly teacher at an English primary school encouraging her class to think of ways of reducing their ‘carbon footprint’.