ITV's Cash Cab, A Moral Lesson on Greed. Here Beginneth the Lecture...

Being sat at home for Xmas, slumped on a sofa a good amount of the time, it provides the perfect opportunity to sample such television as ITV's 'Cash Cab'. The concept, for those of you who've eaten fewer boxes of biscuits this week than me (and therefore are able to escape the sofa more readily), is that an unsuspecting punter or punters flags down a black London taxi, and on getting in are confronted bythe cabbie/compere, who says he'll take them where they want to go or...

Or they can opt to embark on a low-budget mobile Millionaire, where they answer a series of progressively harder questions for increasing payouts. It even has lifelines and everything. I like to take it at face value and believe that it's all above board, legit and on the level, and in no way staged, fixed or otherwise interfered with, purely because I love the concept.

I would love to see someone turn down the offer of the competition and see ITV devoted 15 minutes of airtime to showing a woman with some heavy shopping's ride from Covent Garden to Muswell Hill, with occasional breaks in the silence while the cabbie swears at the otherdrivers he's in the process of cutting up.

In fact, the whole thing just by its very nature necessitates an horiffic car accident caused by a driver distracted by flashing lights as the happy passengers answer a £1000 question by using their third lifeline. Grim, but it's going to happen if this tragic, yet diverting, programme continues. Still, it'll make them a few bob in selling it to It'll Be Alright on the Night XXXIV.