Are you Slap Bang on the money?

Hear that noise? That's the sound of a nation collectively clearing its Filofax. On Saturday 12 May at 6.30pm, a long-anticipated televisual event will keep many of us riveted to our sofas. Ant and Dec, pop culture icons, fresh-faced, hip-haired, mid-twentysomething supremos of Saturday morning telly, are to launch Slap Bang, their latest foray into grown-up TV. Nothing in the way of wild nights out on the tiles is going to lure the more aware and urbane element of society away from their widescreens. Mark my words.

Currently, to be a useful, significant, contributing element of modern society , you need to do three things:

1) Watch Ant and Dec's existing TV programme, the masterful SM:tv Live, a telly phenomenon masquerading as a Saturday morning kids' show, with an audience of 2.2 million - over half of which is made up of 16-to 35-year-olds. If you do this sufficiently, you will know how to do the postbag dance, you will know to refer to Wonky Donkey, the main competition feature, as "the donk with the wonk", and you'll know how to do the-limp-wristed wave.

2) Read culture bible Heat magazine. Heat painstakingly deconstructs celebrity culture to devastating effect, mainlines exclusives on the trashiest elements of the fame hierarchy, constructs inspired theories on the contents of celeb wardrobes, delights in reproducing the most vacuous Hollywood sound bite and so on. It is, in short, dedicated to the cult of celebrity and absolutely nothing else. The 130 per cent year-on-year circulation rise testifies to its spiralling popularity.

3) Subscribe to Popbitch, vicious gossip website which deals in the more outrageous out-takes from celebrity interviews. Popbitch disseminates the rumours that others shy away from. Fed by journalists' seedier dealings with the famous, and the wisdom of its disciples who swap titbits on a message board, it's a focus for anti-celebrity propaganda, a lone voice in a PR-manipulated world.

So, if Slap Bang does as its hype promises, and becomes a grown-up version of SM:tv, it will become a priceless resource for all those aiming to pass themselves off as socially adequate.

Mainstream popular culture, traditionally the preserve of the seven to 17-year-olds, is now everybody's business. Dissected exhaustively at fashionable dinner parties, it's been reinvented as the essential social dynamic of the day. Perceived by the woefully misguided as the main symptom of society's ever increasing dumbing down, it is the only truly democratic art medium: cheap, compulsive, and uniquely non-elitist.

It unites communities - see the Popstars effect, which provoked total strangers to interact on public transport in order to rage over the unfairness of the exclusion of Warren. And it's also the only cultural subsection that involves the constant makeovers of its leading proponents (see Geri Halliwell, Martine McCutcheon, Madonna). Which explains why it is currently more necessary to be able to talk intelligently about the extraordinary forehead of Dawson from Dawson's Creek, than, say, politics. No one inspired the pop culture moment like Ant and Dec. If they hadn't operated from the start on two levels - a psychotically upbeat, slapsticky one directed at the kids, and an older, knowing, slick-witted level for the grown-ups - we might never have understood the sheer beauty of the love of Kerry (once of Atomic Kitten) for Bryan from Westlife.

Personally, I have a terrible passion for Ant and Dec. It began six years ago, when I saved them from certain death by 300 rabid 14-year-olds who had turned up to see them live at the road show I was working on.

Sadly, not everyone is like me. Not everyone consumes popular culture as voraciously. Not everyone has my knack for understanding when a catchphrase is past its sell-by date. As aresult, faux pop culture fans everywhereare frantically interrogating the rest of us for opinions on new Channel 4 soap As If, with a view to passing them off as their own.

So I urge you. Watch Ant and Dec, or reconcile yourself to a life blagging your way pathetically through all decent conversations.