In which James Delingpole gets down with the kids, finds they’re sex-obsessed…

If there’s one thing everyone knows about BBC comedy it’s that it’s going downhill. According to Danny Cohen, now Director of BBC Television, it’s too white and middle class; according to producer John ‘Blackadder’ Lloyd, it’s run by idiots like the bureaucrats in the BBC satire W1A who don’t understand what comedy is; according to the gag-inducingly PC Dara O’Briain, it’s too gag-inducingly PC (he means the quota system they’re trying to introduce whereby every comedy panel show must have a token female); according to John Cleese, it’s never been the same since John Cleese left; etc.

Probably they’re all right. I hardly ever watch comedy series any more because they’re invariably full of young people being free and having lots of messed-up fun while yet asking us to feel sorry for them. But this week, just to check what the kids are up to, I thought I’d have a look at Comedy Feeds — the BBC’s now-annual newbie talent contest for sitcoms and sketch shows.

The BBC screened them all on Sunday night, none of them more than half an hour long, some much shorter. It was an opportunity to play comedy Caligula, deciding on the basis of a few brief scenes which bright young things have a future, and which really shouldn’t give up the day job.

There was one involving vibrators that started quite well: just a nice bit of visual comedy business in which one girl went to the communal TV remote to nick the batteries for her sex toy, only to discover to her disgust that they’d already been pinched for the same purpose by another female flatmate.

But then, unfortunately, it continued in that vein and I realised that smut was all it had to offer: endless filth by gobby girls banging on in different accents about vaginas.