‘I thought it would be a bit of fun while the kids were staying with the grandparents,’ explained 37-year old solicitor Joanne, ‘but Robin really began living the part. He put adverts in the local paper and in the newsagent’s window offering to do gardening, DIY, house clearances, all sorts.’

According to Joanne, her husband has closely modelled his performance on the man they had come around to put up a potting shed last summer. ‘The guy did a good job, for an arthritic 60 year old, and his personal hygiene issues and tobacco chewing habit didn’t seem so bad because he was outdoors most of the time. However, I wasn’t expected to kiss him or, you know…Oh, and did I mention he had a strong West Country accent? It’s doing my head in.’

Living with a man who insists on wearing overalls at all times and continually asks for cups of tea sadly hasn’t worked in spicing up their sex lives, which, if anything, has taken several steps backwards. ‘He stays up late most nights now, fiddling with a Black & Decker Workmate or reading the Mirror,’ continued the frustrated mother of two. ‘One night he did come up to bed and I asked him to talk about something dirty, so he started going on about the state of Mrs A’s pool, down the road.’

There has been an upside to Robin’s dedication however. With cash starting to come in from all the odd-jobs the ‘resting’ actor has taken on, the Lowes now look like they’ll soon be able to pay off the money they owe a private methadone clinic — in 2006 Robin had required an intensive four-week stay for treatment after taking a non-speaking walk-on part as a junkie on The Bill.

Bob’s time on the nation’s screens is set to end this week in the first episode of ‘Bernard the Senior Partner in a Mid-Sized Provisional Insolvency Practitioners’, which sees Dizzy, Lofty, and Bob’s other mechanical friends sold for scrap with the proceeds paid to debtors at 2p in the pound, while Bernard arranges a £180 per hour fee for his time.

Parental response to the decision has been overwhelmingly positive. ‘It’s about time children’s TV caught up with what parents want these days — and that’s not for their offspring to be wandering around in dress-up costumes suggesting they want to be working for the railways or non-professional grade emergency services,’ explained Jan Reeves of West Sussex, ‘I mean OK, Mr Reeves has been known to pop on a firemen’s uniform around the house from time to time, but he’s already a well-established finance director and local magistrate. If I wanted the same thing for young Joshua it would be a big step back for my family. And a bit icky’.

‘I’m delighted to see the new shows’, confirmed Francis Whitley an investment banker with 20 years experience who is currently spending a lot more time at home, ‘to see my little Timmy’s face when I told him that I was on enforced gardening leave ahead of an opportunity to join a rival bank, just like his hero ‘Sebastian the Securities Trader’, well his eyes lit up at the stories he could tell his playschool pals’.

Manual and emergency service workers are not expected to entirely leave the world of children’s television however, with news filtering through that Channel Five has commissioned a new series of ‘Pawel the Plasterer’. The new show is garnering plaudits for encouraging kids to become bi-lingual, and is being made for a fraction of the cost of shows featuring British tradesmen.

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Clegg, who has struggled to gain the public recognition and popularity of his predecessors, and who is now being upstaged by the new ‘tough guy’ image of the Prime Minister, and even the pregnant wife of the Conservative leader, announced to a press conference held in a drugs den in Harlesden that his decision was a sign of the commitment he had to leading his party to power, and that Liberals should return to their constituencies and ‘prepare to be governed by a junkie strung out on shit, man.’

The controversial new strategy, devised by Jane Bonham-Carter, Lib Dem Director of Communications and Clegg’s personal dealer, followed focus group studies showing that Clegg was still suffering from a lower presence in the current public consciousness than every liberal leader back to and including Gladstone, ‘but then even dear old William did have that thing about trips ‘reforming’ prossies’ noted the party’s new PR chief.

‘Nick just didn’t have a hook,’ explained Bonham-Carter, ‘it started going downhill with sweet old Ming whose thing was he was a bit old and sounded like someone from Flash Gordon, but before that we’d had the classic Kennedy booze-hound routine, and before that lovely old Paddy, with his special forces history so there was always that possibility that he’d killed a man — and that was before he started boffing his secretary’.

Clegg had apparently initially favoured the Ashdown approach to leadership, but this was ruled out by insiders when his back story revealed the closest he’d got to one-to-one lethal combat was being quite rude to a call centre employee once. Mrs Clegg was also rumoured to be somewhat resistant to the prospect of his having an affair with his personal assistant to raise the party profile, as was Clegg’s parliamentary secretary, Trevor.

‘This was all we were left with bro,’ explained a clearly woozy Clegg, while pumping his fist to bring up a vein. ‘I suggested a kinda double act routine with me and my deputy, like the two Davids had going back in the day, but even I couldn’t remember who he was, so it was ‘just say yes’ for me.’

‘The downside is the vital late night Commons session on amendments to zoning laws for the hardworking people of rural Cornwall leave me jonesing like a cheap crackhouse whore,’ he continued, ‘but it’ll be worth it when I’m PM and making surprise visits to Afghanistan. This shit is fair trade, right?’

‘It was worse than waterboarding,’ said distressed office worker Miriam Hogarth, 37, of West Drayton. ‘I said I wanted a ham sub and it went mad from there – what kind of bread? Rustic? Italian? Wholemeal? Rustic Italian wholemeal? Six inches? Twelve inches? What ham? What cheese? And that was before they started demanding decisions on salad and choices of dressing; by the time the teenager behind the counter said ‘anything else?’ I cracked and told him about my Post-It notes expenses scam, and my sexual fantasies about a threesome with David and Samantha Cameron.’

‘I also expressed a willingness to take responsibility for a key role in the events of 9/11,’ sobbed Hogarth. ‘Still, I’ll be treated more humanely in Guantanamo. And probably get a tastier lunch too.’

Addressing the hundreds of millions of Catholics around the world, Pope Benedict forthrightly acknowledged that while the Church was a bit slow in recognising the scientific findings of Copernicus and Galileo in the past, at least they didn’t claim to have a scientific mind while still checking their horoscopes in The Mirror. Then, to a great fanfare of incense and dry ice, Pope Benedict was joined on the balcony by Professor Dawkins, who delivered a searing indictment of everyone that has ever had a dinner party conversation about his book ‘The God Delusion’ but concluded that despite the drawbacks of organised religion ‘there must be something out there…’. His concluding remarks ‘shit or get off the pot, for Christ’s sake’ were greeted by an enthusiastic high five from the Apostolic See.

The collaboration between the two men, previously in fierce opposition, led to questions being asked about a possible shift in the thinking of the Pope, which were quickly downplayed by the Vatican: ‘In an ecumenical world, the Catholic Church has always strived to find common ground, but in answer to the many enquiries we have received, I can confirm that the Pope is indeed still Catholic, and that this detente extends only so far as mutual contempt for people willing to give homeopathy a go who also get pissy about the idea of water being turned into wine,’ declared spokesman Monsignor Flavelli, ‘and as to the Church’s views on the eternal souls of atheists, and whether we think they’re ultimately going to burn in hell with the Jews, Muslims and Methodists? Well, as we like to say here in the Vatican, ‘is Professor Dawkins a gobby trumped up zoologist?’’

‘There’d been some wicked car chases and it looked like it was going to be one of those bits with kissing that I usually find dead boring,’ explained Tim, ‘But there was this lady who looked a bit like my form teacher Miss Brown, who’s quite nice and pretty really, and well she got this old man who isn’t as good as Daniel Craig and started, like, squeezing his head between her legs with this funny look on her face…Now I wished I’d remembered to get my dressing gown when I was told to put on my jim-jams on because the film was finishing after my bedtime. I haven’t been able to move since before the last ad break.’

In the longer term, the circumstances of Tim’s first stirrings of physical attraction are expected to have imprinted a series of lifelong sexual characteristics on the boy, which are predicted to see Eastern European women, cold-blooded murder, and the rustling of Mars Celebrations wrappers become lifelong arousal triggers. In the shorter term, his reluctance to stand up and get out of the way of the living room door was on the verge of getting him in trouble with his parents after he wouldn’t move to let his grandfather go to bed.

‘He just bloody sat there all crouched over and getting in the way,’ complained 76-year-old Bill Vallely, ‘and that mad dirty Russian bird had caused a bit of an awakening for meself for the first time in a good ten years and I was dying to get up to the spare room share the news with the missus. It’s one of those moments in life I’ll remember for the rest of my days’.

‘It’s been a miserable time for me and everything’s been going wrong,’ explained Brayley, ‘but when I thought how it’d change lives, and how much happier everyone else would be with me gone, I thought bugger the bastards.’

40 minutes into the holiday classic Brayley had dozed off, and dreamt of being guided by his guardian angel around a world without him, where colleagues got the credit for work they did for him while he was gallivanting around the world on foreign holidays, and friends didn’t have to put up with his boring golf anecdotes.

But in a world without George Brayley, it was his wife who was seen to be the happiest, finally free to pursue an independent career, and her 28-year-old yoga instructor. ‘I could watch her having the time of her life with all the dosh she had from my pension and life insurance settlements and it changed me,’ explained Brayley, ‘my guardian angel told me she believed that every time a cashtill rings an angel gets its wings.’

Waking up as the film finished, and realising what the traffic was likely to be like on the way to the nearest bridge over a treacherous river, Brayley committed to making this the best Christmas ever, even though he hadn’t bothered buying anyone presents on the assumption he’d be long gone.

The bank manager’s commitment to a new lease of life did not last long however, after a row following a Boxing Day viewing of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with his wife inspired her to use the family car to run him over repeatedly in the driveway.