The story behind my naked video

It was a bright Sunday afternoon and I was harmlessly at my desk, minding my own business, when from the other end of the house I heard the screech of a thousand cats being boiled alive in oil. ‘Why did he do it? WHY??’ a female teenage voice wailed, half plaintive, half accusing, all righteous fury. It was my daughter’s — and evidently I’d been rumbled.

So why exactly had the poor girl’s embarrassing father chosen to film a naked video of himself and then post it up on YouTube for the entire world to see? Well the main one, fairly obviously, was as a satirical response to Victoria Bateman, the Cambridge professor who has been protesting against Brexit over the past few weeks by using the novel method of getting her kit off on TV and the internet.

Like Dr Bateman, I scrawled BREXIT in black ink across my chest. Unlike her, I did leave at least a teeny bit to the imagination: I covered my wedding tackle with an enormous dangling sock. Partly this was for puerile comedic purposes; partly to avoid being censored; but mainly because filming outdoors in February is not conducive to the most flattering portrait of a chap’s rude bits.

With luck, my video would make me the latest viral internet sensation. Millions would love me for the devil-may-care japester I am. Also, thanks to some intensive sessions at the gym recently, I’m looking quite hench for a balding, middle-aged man. So this video, it occurred to me, might provide a useful corrective to that awful picture doing the rounds of me in my swimming trunks, taken when I was seriously ill but didn’t realise how ill, looking like a hideous image from the liberation of Belsen.