the level to which they are taking it? This is the third series the pair have worked on together in which they have been asked to exist in the dangerous hinterland between themselves, their telly selves, and their drunk telly selves - their programmes being about beer and wine. The results are beyond weird. Over the course of a mere five minutes Oz and May can present the viewer with a whole peacock's fan of lies, from a plain pretend drunken spat, to a real drunken spat with the pair unconsciously switching personalities, to a pretend drunken spat with both of them firmly in character and yet still completely unable to sustain the pre-agreed version 50 of the 'I can't take this kind of chaos' expression.

Like certain scenes in the later movies of Ken Loach, these moments can stretch, gobsmackingly, for minutes on end, entirely convinced of their verisimiltude - only Loach would never stoop to suddenly cutting to a voice-over involving the two protagonists bitching about the "intellectualisation of the sausage" (May thinks that putting anything more than a scrotum inside a sausage renders it "intellectual" ie A Bad Thing).

8: Of course the whole 'presenters-not-liking-each-other-but-secretly-liking-each-other-very-much-indeed-and-playing-on-the-viewers-desperate-and-inexplicable-need-to-know-that-they-do-in-fact-actually-like-each-other' rap was born on Top Gear. When Richard Hammond almost died in an accident the nation turned to Jeremy Clarkson needing to hear him say something nice about his 'hampster' in much the same way as they turned to the Queen after the croaking of Lady Di.

May and Clarke have reached the point of no return and are now quite, quite mad

9: Why am I watching? Because it's addictive. Acting is addictive. Doing it, watching it. Poison in the veins. I'm hooked. Help.

10: With only two programmes in this current series left, it's clear that May and Clarke have reached the point of no return and are now quite, quite mad. Last week some nice cider producer in Herefordshire said that if only three more of us decided to start drinking perry regularly he would need at least 40 years notice to build up the stock, so rare is the perry pear. Oz was actually genuinely interested and surprised - and responded by not saying anything at all. You could feel the tension draining out of the programme, the momentary relaxing of the terrible modern pretence of being 'in the moment'. On TV, and off, it's a disease that claims more lives than any other.