‘We’ve noticed how viewers of Final Score are happy to watch other people watching football matches rather than watching the matches themselves’ he explained, ‘so we’re going to expand the idea to other areas of BBC programming. For example, instead of paying millions for the rights to show Wimbledon next year we’ll just show Sue Barker and John McEnroe watching tennis for a fortnight instead. It’ll save a fortune. We might even be able to pay some of our staff pensions.’

He went on to add that the plan wasn’t just restricted to sports coverage. ‘With immediate effect we’re also going stop making Eastenders’ he said. ‘Instead we’ll just show four carefully selected soap opera pundits watching TV screens and making the sort of comments you’d normally make whilst watching it, like ‘look at that – another token ethnic family has just moved in’ or ‘oh my word, someone’s just been unfaithful, who’d have thought it’. Of course, there won’t be anything on their screens, but the viewers won’t know that.‘ He also revealed that costume dramas, sitcoms and gameshows would also receive the Final Score treatment, although he admitted that it might be difficult to find four people willing to pretend to laugh whilst watching My Family.

Mr Thompson also hinted that even greater savings could be found by merging all BBC channels into one, with different pundits watching BBC1, 2, 3, 4, News 24, CBBC and Cbeebies all at the same time. ‘It could be terribly exciting. Just imagine cutting to updates from Nick Robinson watching Bargain Hunt to Mr Tumble watching Prime Minister’s Questions to Ainsley Harriett watching In The Night Garden, or something’ he grinned. ‘We could even scrap our own ‘programming’ altogether and just show pundits watching ITV and Sky’ he added.

An additional benefit of the plan would be to breathe new life into the BBC’s busy schedule of repeats. ‘You could watch different pundits watching each episode of 2 Pints of Lager another 20 times and every time it would be as fresh and funny as the first time you saw it’ he said.

A further announcement from Mr Thompson is expected later today in an interview that can be seen by watching the Ten o’Clock News, where Huw Edwards will be watching tonight’s ITN News at 10.

The BBC entered a new era this weekend with the launch of ‘BBC Hardcore’ – a free to air pornography channel intended to compete with the fastest growing area of digital broadcasting. ‘BBC 69’ as it will also be known will cater for those who are currently being attracted away from the corporation’s mainstream channels by programmes featuring large breasted women having sex with unlikely strangers at very little prompting.

‘We have to recognise that there is a market for these programmes’ acknowledged the BBC Director General Mark Thompson, reacting to tabloid headlines such as ‘Auntie’s Bloomer’s Now Crotchless’; ‘Our public service brief is to cater for everyone. We see it as part of the BBC’s historic remit to inform, educate, and sexually arouse.’

The first programme on ‘BBC 69’ as it will also known, was a fly-on-the-wall type documentary about a muscle-bound pizza delivery man who received an order from a lone blonde woman specifying that she wanted ‘extra large sausage’. The programme was followed by a public service announcement, stating ‘If you were affected by any of the issues raised in ‘We Promise Not to Come Within 30 Minutes’ then please phone the BBC 24 hour Helpline for interactive live chat with these girls.

BBC Hardcore is also launching a competition to find Britain’s next big porn star, with thousands of unlikely candidates auditioning to be the winner of ‘The XXX Factor.’ ‘I’ve definitely got what it takes to win The XXX Factor’ said twenty-stone grandmother of seven Mavis Johnson from Wigan to the derisive laughter of the judges. Finalists in the search for a porn-star will have to demonstrate their versatility by specializing in a different fetish every week, with Bruce Forsyth guiding the contestants through their paces.

At a Press The Director General claimed that BBC Hardcore represented the future of Public Service Broadcasting, and went on to praise a number of the individual programmes in some detail. Although he confessed that he was unable to comment on the end of ‘LadyBoys Must Be Punished’; ‘as I heard my wife coming downstairs.’

The BBC has admitted it might have gone a step too far with its latest TV license advertising campaign in which it asks if you really want to be the bitch of a twenty stone serial killer with bad breath.

The public information film featuring the agonising cries of a man, filtering through the windows of a prison shower block, has the pay-off line ‘TV detector vans can quickly find you. But not as quick as a pack of sex-starved lifers’. It is part of series of hard hitting adverts aimed at the minority of viewers who do not buy a TV license. Others in the series feature a ‘license-cheat’ swinging from the gallows at Tyburn as the mob cheer and spit at the corpse, even though public executions were abolished hundreds of years ago.

And although it is virtually unheard of for people who do not pay their TV license to be sent to prison, the BBC has been keen to up the stakes in the battle against the so-called ‘license cheat-scum.’ We tried having Gloria Hunniford smiling and saying ‘Remember there are lots different ways to pay,’ explained the BBC Director General. ‘But our research showed that this was nowhere near as effective as having Terry Wogan saying, ‘Listen, do you really want to get bum-raped by a load of tattooed psychos from D wing?’

Ironically the advert prompted the governor of Wandsworth Prison to enquire whether he had ever got round to getting a license for the hundreds of televisions in his inmates’ cells. He is now serving a one-week sentence with Category A prisoners where his responsibilities include cleaning the shower and scrubbing the floor in the poorly supervised boiler room.

Stoopy de Gunt