Best Ever Hidden Camera Stunts 2

All right, so the title is rubbish (presumably the idea of calling it The Second-Best Ever Hidden Camera Stunts was nixed at an early production meeting), but this is still - against all the odds - a great piece of guilty-pleasure TV.

Dropping all the lazy, derivative nonsense (and, yes, Ashton Kutcher, we're talking about you), this Top 10 countdown zooms in on the most complex, cruel and just plain ludicrous stunts.

How about the bit where Jeremy Beadle seemingly pushed a van containing a market trader's entire stock into the sea? Or the time Ant and Dec conned Lorraine Kelly into believing they were a couple of old codgers about to marry teen brides on GMTV?

Or the Gotcha where Noel Edmonds stretched a five-minute quiz on Dave Lee Travis's radio show out to nearly an hour, by replacing the contestants with actors and making certain that they kept getting all the questions wrong?

Apparently, DLT was so offended by that stunt that it was a good few years before he spoke to Edmonds again. Surely a great result for them both.

But the Edmonds and Beadles of the world pale into insignificance behind Dom Joly. And we're not talking about him pretending to be a traffic warden or jogging around bellowing into a huge mobile phone, either.

In the 2000 General Election, Joly actually formed his own political party, the Teddy Bear Alliance. Hiring 380-plus teddy bear costumes, he and his mates harassed politicians up and down the country for weeks. Joly even went as far as legally changing his name by deed poll to Edward Bear just so that he could stand for election against Alan Clark. He got 218 votes.

The best stunt on the show, though, isn't even English. In the mid-Nineties, German TV programme Do You Understand Fun? set up a fake building site on the corner of a busy street. When the cameras were rolling, a workmen would ask a passer-by something, and when he had their attention, walk towards them over a large puddle.

Halfway across he would suddenly sink out of sight and not resurface (they had dug a pit and hidden an aqualung at the bottom of it). The stunned looks on the faces of onlookers are priceless.