Home with a cable nit

What with Al-Jazeera in disarray after its boss was accused of spying for Saddam, there is surely a gap in the Middle Eastern market for my new Arab TV station. It is a shopping channel called Fun-Damentalist, and we will be selling all manner of specialist foodstuffs, including our Cheeses of Nazareth range (mature Jeddah cheese only £2.99 a pound), and a variety of triple-thick sheikhs.

Meanwhile, the clothing department will be offering a two-for-one deal on our unique Pak-a-Yashmak, a slim and lightweight garment tailored from easy-to-clean polythene and ideal for today's busy Islamic woman to carry in her handbag, for those difficult times when Sharia law is being enforced.

As our advertising puts it: "Ladies, if you're wearing Western clothing and see a mullah coming down the street, just slip on your Pak-a-Yashmak and, hey presto, you'll be fully veiled and able to hide that tell-tale bottle of gin from prying eyes, so you can get stoned at home without being stoned in public."

You may think that my station sounds odd, but there are plenty of far stranger cable channels on the planet, including the American one that's been broadcasting The Michael Essany Show for the past five years. A Leno and Letterman wannabe, Essany hosts his own local cable-access chat show in the sitting room of his parents' house in Valparaiso, Indiana, and he has become a sort of real-life version of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy.

After years of media indifference, this irrepressible 19-year-old has finally garnered some wider exposure, thanks to a behind-the-scenes series (also entitled The Michael Essany Show), which began its UK run on C4 last night.

A remarkable achievement for a likeable but gawky young man who still lives with mom and dad and is so physiognomically challenged that, were he ever to breed, he could found his own Minging Dynasty.

"Good evening America," Essany began last night, before inviting us to see how a typical show was constructed. While he wrote the opening monologue and attempted to book guests, his mother attended to his make-up and wardrobe, which was no easy task because there is something of the middle-period Picasso about his facial features, and his dress sense can be summed up in two words: panic buy.

With his father working as stage manager and chauffeur, and mom doubling as director (and adding a laugh track that sounded more genuine than the real audiences on many chat shows), the final result was just as professional as an average edition of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and considerably less self-indulgent than Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.

Essany is probably now reaching a wider audience than Ross, too, not-withstanding a speech impediment that makes him sound as though he's recently had an operation on his adenoids: not to have them removed, but to have more put in.

As I watched, I began thinking about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that the presence of an observer will affect the outcome of an experiment, because that was clearly the case with the film crew here. Kelly Rowland of Destiny's Child, may not be the biggest star in the US, but her willingness to spend an hour squeezed into a Valparaiso living room surely had less to do with Essany's local cable broadcast than the cameras that were recording the making of the show, and would therefore guarantee her some national coverage.