OK, so the ticket's free. Big deal. I'm providing a service here. I sacrifice an evening at home in front of my telly, just to watch the same bollocks but with extra smells. You brave the horrors of London Transport to get to the inaccessible hell-hole where TV companies chose to build their studios (White City, Teddington, the South Bank, all happening convenient gigs, right?), just to give those bastards with their pony-tails and their O-Levels in Media Studies the sound of my laughter - free of charge - so that the poor mugs at home, esconced on their comfy sofas will think, 'Well, somebody found this shite funny, it can't be completely worthless.'
 
 

You eventually get to this concrete monstrosity (all TV studios are designed by sociopaths), queue for hours outside in the ubiquitous sleet, and get sneered at by passing TV employees who can't believe that you are volunteering to spend the evening in the same way that they get paid vast amounts of over-time to do. Mind you, when you examine your fellow queue-ees, the scoffing is quite in order. Because Studio Audiences comprise the dregs of society. Let's face it, who, with a fully-functioning psyche, wants to actually sit near Noel bastard Edmonds and watch his wretched House Party? Unarmed? Obviously a cool TV programme like... well, I can't actually think of one at the moment - might attract a higher class of sad sack.
 
 

You sit there on your buttock-crunching chair, atop the dodgiest scaffolding outside of a Pink Floyd concert, several hundredweight of lighting swaying above you and held up only by non-EEC regulation rubber bands, and get blasted by the arctic air conditioning. A wretched man in a nasty jumper and headphones, clutching a clipboard and a stop-watch, is wandering around, and you realise that, despite his ugliness, his acne and his undoubted BO, he is having a better, more interesting and higher-paid life than you.
 
 

Clipboard Man grabs a mike, gets applauded by the audience (the bastard!), mutters some inarticulate nonsense about seeing yourself on the monitors barely defying gravity above you, and then hands you over to the ultimate horror; the Warm-Up man.
 
 

A Warm-Up Man has three objectives

1. To Be Loathesome,
2. To be racist, sexist and homophobic - it's as though Ben Elton never happened
3. To be so screamingly unfunny that the episode of Dad, or Laura & Disorder, or something gruesome with Nick Hancock seems, by comparison, rib-tickingly hilarious. He adopts an appearance which is half-way between Open University Lecturer (the hair, trousers and tie) and Pontins (the jacket).

Then the celeb is introduced. They appear, with a particular bounding motion which only minor celebrities can achieve when appearing in front of an audience as their inadequate selves. They grab the mike and try to display a mock humility which could turn a nun psychopathic. Despite all this you hope they notice you and realise that you are far superior to the rabble with whom you are currently liaised. Maybe even invite you for a light supper at Joe Allen's after the recording? Even Richard Whitely makes you feel like this.
 
 

The celeb and WarmUp Man indulge in light banter which, in more enlightened societies would be a prelude to war. The celeb never lets WUM forget that he is not actually in the programme about to be recorded (or invited to the drinks do afterwards), while WUM never lets Celeb forget that he was in some 70s soft-porn movie with Robin Askwith and Irene Handl and that WUM has a copy.
 
 

The bloody thing starts. A actor forgets his line. If he's the star he gets a round of applause and a constant repeat fee from Denis Norden. If he's a bit part, he never works again. The show is constantly stopped. A prop falls apart, a boom comes into shot, another line is fluffed. Each time we laugh and clap. Professional incompetence should be rewarded, don't you think? Especially if the culprit gets his inflated salary drawn from our Licence Fee.
 
 

After about forty-seven hours of watching the same bits being done again and again and a-fucking-gain, the horrible experience is over. The celebs piss off to score some drugs, the producer shags the young actress just out of drama school with a promise of getting her an audition for The Bill, and the audience are perfunctorily dismissed back to their coaches and the suburban rat-holes they crawled out from.
 
 

Six months later, you watch the programme on the box. What carved out a large irretrievable chunk of your life, and cost more than your house to make, takes up just 24 minutes of TV time, and is then dumped in some archive, never to be seen in the civilised world again, just Canada and UK Gold.