‘It was never an easy relationship with their mother, Princess Padme,’ explained Vader who had dressed as Batman to draw attention to his plight. ‘I was apprenticed as a Jedi on minimum wage, supposed to remain celibate, then she was suddenly promoted over my head to become Queen Amidala and a member of the Galactic Senate. It was the stress of it all that turned me to the Dark Side.’

‘But I was doing it all for her, and she just couldn’t see it,’ continued Vader. ‘If you read her divorce petition, it’s all ‘He changed, he killed the Sand People and the Jedi Younglings, he’s a Sith Lord, he tried to strangle me using the force, blah, blah, blah’. Nobody asked my side of the story. Plus, she had a very good lawyer.’

Soon after his pregnant wife fled the family planet and died shortly after giving birth to twins. The children were then taken into care by Jedi social services and were adopted by separate parents in different star systems. Vader then spent much of the next twenty years searching for his children, but to no avail.

‘If only I’d known Princess Leia was my daughter then I might not have had her tortured on the Death Star – or only a little bit anyway,’ he reflected. ‘But it’s hard for a father reunited with his children after so long. When I finally met my son I offered to set him up with a good job, a pension, health care, company Tie fighter, but he had a lot of anger issues. It’s just a shame I couldn’t channel it towards the Dark Side. I just lost it and cut off his hand, which may not have been the best response.’

Despite the setbacks Vader is hopeful of regaining contact with his children. ‘I’m building this nice new Death Star just off Endor, somewhere they can stop by and visit, maybe stay over eventually and bring the grandchildren. Just don’t pass the address on to the Child Support Agency.’

Quaz (hat-tip to bonjonelson)

‘We deeply regret the huge loss of face – sorry, life – and will not rest until we find out who knew what was going on and gave the order to fire,’ said Lord Vader. ‘We now accept that the culprits were not two rogue stormtroopers who were larking about with a hackysack on their lunchbreak and knocked a cup of coffee all over the control panel triggering the accidental emission of a devastatingly powerful laser beam that just happened to be pointing towards the planet. We think their supervisor, a woman named Red Leader, might have been involved as well. Either way, it seems there were some bad apples working for the Dark Side.’

Internal investigations were hampered by the unexpected demise of anyone claiming to know who was ultimately responsible. ‘Yes, it’s unfortunate that everyone present on the command deck that day has been found dead of natural causes, clutching their necks with a look of terror and despair in their eyes,’ continued Lord Vader. ‘A faulty life support system appears to have caused an outbreak of legionnaires disease – those are classic symptoms.’

Intergalactic police are centring their enquiries around a shuttle craft seen leaving the Death Star two minutes after the peace-loving world was blown up. Identikit pictures of the driver and passenger look somewhat like ‘a tall man with a shiny black hat, and a shorter, craggy-faced older man wearing a cape’.

‘What was I doing that day?’ said Vader. ‘I can’t remember exactly – I think I may have been on holiday at the time. Or washing my hair. There’s certainly no way I could have known what some of the troops were getting up to. In fact the first I heard of it was when someone hacked the Death Star’s answer machine and I read about in the News of the Universe last Sunday.’

Barry Henry from Huddersfield first heard the music while out for a walk in the Pennines. ‘I wasn’t sure what it was for a few minutes,’ he said. ‘It kept coming and going. Then when I stopped for a cup of tea and some Kendal mint cake I realised it was music, and then I remembered where I’d heard it before. My first thought was, ‘Shit, yes, the Pope’s coming to visit isn’t he?’ It quite spoilt my mint cake I can tell you.’

The ‘Emperor’s Theme’, used in Episode VI of the Star Wars trilogy and three abysmal ‘prequels’, is the theme for the evil Emperor Palpatine, aka Darth Sidious. Many have commented on the similarities in appearance between the Pope and Palpatine but this appears to be the first time the Universe has spontaneously made the connection itself.

Tracy Notts from Canterbury, a fan of the original trilogy who first heard the music on the North Downs Way in Kent, said she wasn’t at all surprised. ‘Admittedly the Pope doesn’t shoot blue lightning from his hands – or not in public anyway – but his flair for medieval clothing and apparent desire to spread AIDS make him seem pretty evil. I think we always knew which Star Wars character he was.’

This is not the first time Ms Nott has picked up hints of Star Wars music in the air. Only last week she distinctly heard the sinister strains of ‘The Imperial March’, theme music of the evil Darth Vader, when another convert to the dark side, Tony Blair, was touring the country signing copies of his memoirs.

‘Every day is a living nightmare’ said clone Storm trooper A4815162342 who has been diagnosed as suffering from ‘Star Wars Syndrome’. ‘When we were first created we were best mates with the Jedi, followed them into battle, went to the Cantina after work with them for a few jars, and looked after their Padawan. Then all of a sudden the Emperor sends out this order 66 and we kill the Jedi. After that Darth Vader and the Emperor took control and we were suddenly the baddies.’ The storm trooper went on to explain how he was wracked with guilt, was unable to sleep, started drinking, and finally ended up being kicked out of the corps and living on the streets.

Jenny Spinner from the charity ‘Storm troopers need friends’ says that this story is an all too common one. ‘Every day, we have Storm troopers coming to us with the same stories, of feeling a terrible sense of betrayal. If they feel like this, then imagine the psychological issues that Darth Vader has to confront; one minute he is the unconventional Jedi Anakin Skywalker, then in the space of a couple of minutes he gives in to the Dark Side, kills all the younglings and becomes the second most evil man in the Galaxy after the Emperor himself. That’s going to take a lot of counselling.’

Jenny’s charity tries to help ex-Storm troopers by giving their lives meaning and structure again. ‘We provide them with work in a local donkey sanctuary to get them back on the road to recovery’. Asked if it worked, Jenny said ‘Not really, no. They usually shoot the donkeys and burn down the stables.’

Quaz

‘Darth had set his heart on building a space station in orbit around the moon of Endor, but this would be no ordinary second home. It was the size of a small moon – a very ambitious project for a first time builder,’ said a worried McCloud.

‘The site itself was in a Galaxy far, far away, so it was a logistical nightmare. There was no popping round to the local DIY store for a bit of sand or the odd plumbing fitting. It took meticulous planning and everything had to arrive on site on time and on budget. Darth took the brave, some would say ‘foolhardy’ decision to project manage the build himself, but he proved to he was pretty ruthless with his contractors. We caught him using The Force to crush the windpipe of an electrician who turned up a couple of hours late.’

The programme also reveals that Darth Vader failed to secure planning permission for the development. The Ewoks inhabiting Endor formed a local action group and wrote some pretty harsh objection letters to the local council. ‘Luckily for Darth they had never been higher off the ground than the tallest tree and lacked the technology to put a building control officer into orbit, otherwise an enforcement notice would have been served to stop construction altogether,’ McCloud revealed.

The final result can be seen on Channel four on Thursday, and Kevin has expressed admiration for Darth’s grand design. ‘It’s a brave, modernist, steel-framed construction. My main worries were a lack of shielding around a couple of vents in the central trench, but you’ll have to watch the show to see how it turned out.’

Software giant Microsoft has admitted that the launch of the latest Stephen Hawking upgrade has had to be delayed due to problems with the new operating system, which keeps crashing whenever asked to calculate when the universe began.

The announcement is the latest in a series of setbacks to the Stephen Hawking Vista, including a Max-Headroom-type stutter, a tendency to cause the user to binge drink and an unexplained tendency to say ‘physics is shit, physics is shit’.

But retiring Microsoft supremo Bill Gates preferred to concentrate on the benefits that the new version will bring. ‘Vista offers the user a vastly improved voice synthesiser with a choice of forty voices including Darth Vader, Donald Duck, Tom Baker and Kenny from South Park. It also features new bolt-ons such as a built in MP3 player and a teasmade.’

But for the time being users can only access the traditional Stephen Hawking voice which has proved so popular with Radiohead fans who entering the lyrics to ‘Fitter, Happier’. Hopes that Stephen Hawking could be used for advertising voice-overs and football commentary have suffered a set-back. The launch has now been rescheduled to early 2009, or as the Stephen Hawking Vista described it ‘1970’.

The government’s support for faith schools has come under further criticism following a damning Ofsted report for the first Jedi School, St Yoda Brownhoods.

The school, established in 2002 in the wake of the census which showed 390,000 people in the UK were registered Jedi, was revealed to be operating a covert selection policy and ignoring the National Curriculum. Ofsted inspectors said the pupils even lacked a basic grasp of English grammar, although the headteacher was ‘comment unwilling to’.

The report claimed that religious education was focused too narrowly around ‘the Force’, and school uniform was ‘scruffy and impractical’, with many of the students being encouraged to dress like hoodies, albeit in a sort of brown sackcloth thing. Inspectors also discovered serious bullying against droids, while there was barely a fluorescant light bulb left that hadn’t been yanked out of its socket and used as a weapon against another pupil.

In addition, students were found to be bunking off for extended periods, offering such excuses as ‘A hologram of a princess told me to’. Very few pupils were staying on until the Upper Sith.

However, the new Jedi Academy has claimed that the Ofsted Inspection was biased and one-sided. They were particularly alarmed at the report’s conclusion that the Academy ‘must be wiped off the face of the universe’ – the exact phrase used by the Ofsted chief inspector, a Mr D. Vader.

Zadok (with help from simon jmr, thackeray, uncle marvo and ianslat)