Why I'll never get anywhere...

From here on in and out and up also, I've nonsensically realised...my career is ruined. I've reached a cul de sac from which there is no escape. Even the little path down the side where the cats live is grown over with weeds with bits of bottle in them.

Metaphors aside, this is a serious problem. I've reached an actual, factual dilemma within my line of work. The thing is...

People don't take comedy seriously.

Not any more at any rate. There's too much of it! You couldn't go around congratulating the creators of every last little tease on facebook, every chuckly text spam starter. Unrewarding. So no, comedy is what nobody wants any more. Case in point: PhoneShop, e4's latest comedy, promoted to the max just to fall short at the finish line, because it was poo.

And if that's what they're pushing out in the comedy line at e4, the most fantastically modern of the twelve and a half (they can't count for a whole if they're only active for three hours) channels available to me through freeview, then the genre has surely been cut off at the source, left floating in a crevasse full of piss-flavoured reviews and slipping quickly to the murky depths.

Which brings me to my dilemma: With comedy moribund what in Christ's name am I going to do? The mildly amusing and the amusingly mild are my expert areas. I try writing serious from time to time, and as a comedian I'm something of a barely hatched duck, but take a genre out of the picture and you're blowing me out of the water, with nothing but a few scraps of singed debris to cling to.

The solution of course would be for TV to buck up it's ideas and start pushing out some serious commo-gold, but sadly this is 2010, and all the jokes are gone. There is literally, from this point on, in my opinion, nothing worth laughing at that doesn't hark back to the yesteryear. This is the jokepocalypse, laughageddon, et cetera (I was going to put a variation of judgement day here, but it's three am, I've just watched 5 episodes of Nathan Barley back to back and my brain's as fried as insert fried thing here)

Pack your bags, kids, and smash the TV. They're here. They're coming. And if you're craving those last few laughs before that awful cold silence, head over to my house, we'll have a 1900 film fest like you would believe (2000-2010 included of course).

Screw the ratings TV dudes, you've had my envisage, hang up your pens and call Morris or Gervais or something. And hurry, my carpet wasn't laid to suit these sort of chuckles...