I HAVE a great idea for a new telly show. It's such an obvious ratings winner that I should sell it for a lorra, lorra lolly to Granada Media or some similar company.

I HAVE a great idea for a new telly show. It's such an obvious ratings winner that I should sell it for a lorra, lorra lolly to Granada Media or some similar company.

But I don't know how to go about that sort of thing, so instead I'll just share it with you.

The series will be called I'm A Non-Entity… Get Me On Telly!

It will feature a rag-bag collection of people vaguely famous for being vaguely famous. They will be made to live on a desert island and sing bad songs badly until the viewers can't stand it any more.

At that point the last person left watching will be declared the winner and go on to be vaguely famous.

As a spin-off, the non-entity most hated by the other non-entities will be offered a £1million recording deal to continue singing bad songs badly.

Appearances on Top Of The Pops, Saturday morning telly and the Graham Norton show will follow as night follows day.

Some time after that, I would expect to see one of the also-ran non-entities taking part in Celebrity Blind Date. And then go on to star in a fly-on-the-wall documentary series, Real Footballers' Wives.

The winning viewer could host one edition only of Have I Got Old Jokes For You. And maybe, being a complete non-entity, and not even vaguely famous, make a bid for the leadership of the Conservative party.

There could be a documentary about the making of the original gameshow. Then a documentary about the making of the documentary.

Then a documentary about the Conservative party. (No, you're right, scrub that one – no one would watch it.)

Future programmes could feature some of the vaguely famous also-rans coming to YOUR house to mess up your decoration, cover your garden with old railway sleepers, and cook an inedible meal from the contents of YOUR fridge.

Any minor accidents during the filming of Changing Rooms For The Worse could quickly be converted into attractive water features.

Meanwhile, the inedible products of Ready Steady Burn could be applied to the walls.

Nothing will be wasted. It's a perfect, seamless, multiple product – recyclable TV.

It could create enough unwatchable footage to have a whole satellite channel all to itself. Another channel, Non-Entity TV +1, will show all the same programmes an hour later. The repeats could run endlessly on Non-Entity TV Gold.

Dennis Nordern and Terry Wogan will host a channel devoted to all the hilarious out-takes.

Finally, there will be a one-off Christmas special (to be repeated annually), After They Were Vaguely Famous. This will show, sensationally, that even the most vaguely famous non-entities are ordinary, boring people like all the rest of us!

I don't see how this sensational, original idea can fail. Unlike, say, Hear'Say.

***

NOW if you think MY ideas are crazy and surreal, how about THIS one?

An answer has been found to the problem of Britain's increasingly crowded motorways. An answer that will instantly increase their capacity by between a third and a half.

Now, what – apart from blue signs and blue lines on the map – makes motorways different from other dual carriageway roads? That's right – the hard shoulder.

Somewhere you can get off the road safely if you break down or have an accident. A refuge (albeit a narrow and scary one) from the hurtling traffic.

Or, if you look at it another way, mile upon mile of almost unused hard surface. One stroke of a pen and a two-lane carriageway becomes a three-lane one.

Thousands of miles of extra road are instantly created, without covering an extra inch of the countryside in tarmac. Brilliant.

Except that now every flat tyre, boiling radiator or minor bump becomes a potential mass pile-up.

So, another idea that seems very clever until you start to consider what it actually means. Typical, in fact, of that bunch of Monty Python characters known as the government.

Or, in this case, a Blackadder blimp. Transport secretary Darling is relying on the verge-of-madness scheme to meet an otherwise totally unrealistic government target for cutting congestion.

Fortunately, an RAC survey of real people who drive real cars on real roads this week found that 83 per cent think driving on the hard shoulder would be dangerous.

Unfortunately, Mr and Mrs Cut-Out of Westminster don't have a very good record for listening to what real people think.