Blog: What a curious lot we are. On the one hand you can’t move, speak, sell a jolly golly or crack a joke without referring to your manual on racism/sexism/ageism/human rights and so on, to the point where you need an international expert to go to the pub with you.

The other hand? Well that includes the belittling, taunting, sometimes vicious, often cruel mockery called entertainment yet which seems not to have an ism.

It is, though, a reason people tune in to X Factor, Big Brother and getting celebrities out of the jungle – though I admit to watching some of that series with Carol Thatcher to see whether she had her mother’s tough streak. She did.

To be fair, X Factor can produce real talent towards the finals, but some acts in early rounds are cringingly awful.

Talentless souls only there at all to get a slanging match going between them and the judges and to give audiences a great, thigh-slapping laugh.

They used to say Anne Robinson’s Weakest Link was the cruellest cut. She’s a pussycat compared with some programme personnel who grimly plan tactics intended to humiliate and create audience belly laughs.

Of course half the contestants should never be there in the first place. But Saturday night with a beer and a pie bucks up no end with a bit of knife twisting between a full-of-itself panel and a few sad people who had been unkindly led to believe they had talent.

And who really complains about that? I might be tempted to say live and let live if it wasn’t for that other sinister crowd dedicated to protecting people who don’t need or want their protection, thank you very much. Old Irish jokes were tame stuff compared with this shaming of the “oh-and-your-mum-said-you-were-amazing,” by those who are shameless.

In Capetown recently we admired magnificent gollies (in largely black South Africa, remember) modelled on Desmond Tutu and the delighted former Archbishop insisted on posing with one himself. No, he does not need a human rights campaigner, thank you.

And so to Big Brother, which I understand had Sally Bercow nearly in tears in the lavatory (I didn’t see Saturday’s kick-offs, only read about them. Since you ask, we watched an old Morse instead) and all the inmates dressed as bandaged mummies to entertain the strange pharaoh figure of Mohammed Al Fayed. Mummies? Dummies, more like.

Oops! Is that an insult?