Smashing time? Hardly

As the annual celebration of the birth of Christ approaches, it's inspiring to see that the Cross and the Crescent are enthusiastically laying into each other once more, in a no-nonsense, total cessation-of-life kind of way. Louis Farrakhan is urging the Nation of Islam to rise up against "the Satanic colonial powers", while the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, is equally adamant that the bombing of Baghdad might well be justified, thereby demonstrating yet again that our Church leaders are some of the least Christian people on the planet. Still, what else can one expect from the C of E, which frequently denounces the National Lottery as evil gambling, yet isn't averse to a flutter on the stock market, and owns shares in construction companies, so they'll benefit financially from the rebuilding that comes after the war. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.

I've always regarded unnecessary destruction as a cause for sadness, not celebration, so I have little sympathy for the Neanderthal motivations that fuel Channel 5's new game show, Demolition. "It's the show that brings you crazed Deconstruction on a grand scale," we were told, but what I witnessed last night wasn't some searing Jacques Derrida-style post-structuralist critique of a literary text, dear me no, just two teams of overgrown boys with toys pulverising the contents of a bar-room, then forcing the debris into barrels.

The runt son of those piano-smashing contests that marred the early series of It's A Knockout in the 1960s, the format puts circular saws and breaker hammers into the grasping mitts of people who seem barely able to locate their own arses with both hands, and encourages them to entertain us in the only way they know how: by taking three-dimensional objects and flattening them into two-dimensional ones. Speaking of two-dimensional objects brings me to Emily Booth, a presenter so lacking in depth that, if you revolved her through 90 degrees, she'd disappear. Assisting her were a pair of "Demolition Girls" who both looked like Daisy from The Dukes of Hazzard, the sort of underdressed women who are often seen straddling 1,000cc babe magnets on the front covers of glossy motorcycle magazines, which are bought exclusively by men who don't actually have a girlfriend.

And commenting on the proceedings were two men who spoke in a curiously frenetic macho patois that I didn't even know existed until The Fast Show began their "Let's Offroad!" parody some years ago. "A great display of brute force... and it's Goodnight Vienna!" they cried, and generally seemed to possess between them the brain of a slightly dim four-year-old, who was doubtless glad to get rid of it.

As the Blue Panthers and the Barroom Brits competed to see who could cram the most wreckage into the barrels, I embarked upon a challenge of my own - trying to stay awake until the end of the programme. "Time is of the essence," screamed the commentators as small bits of wood and twisted metal were reduced to even smaller bits of wood and twisted metal, their constant frenzied shouting suggestive of two broadcasters who knew in their hearts that the patient was already dead. Watching the inexpert contestants handling potentially lethal machinery with astonishing ineptitude, I feared that they might soon be demolishing themselves or their colleagues, rather than the barroom, and despite the presence of a couple of Health and Safety Officers, I wonder how long it will be until there's a fatal Michael Lush-style incident here. Still, as Michael Hurll (producer of The Late Late Breakfast Show) cheerfully told reporters after the inquest that followed Mr Lush's demise (a death caused solely by an insatiable appetite for thrills and novelty, at whatever cost to the public), "that's showbusiness".

The sight of a piano being dropped 75 feet from a 25-ton crane was shameful to behold (although, to be fair, it still sounded better than Jools Holland will on his forthcoming Hogmanay show), and that spectacle somehow symbolised the pointless violence of the entire programme. For reasons that were never explained, it was shot in Australia, and one presumes that 98per cent of the production budget must have been spent on the flights, because what washed up on our screens looked extraordinarily cheap and nasty.

Channel 5 has improved its image considerably over the past year, but the spirit of Gerald Ratner hasn't yet been exorcised from Long Acre, and the makers of this series clearly have no higher ambition than to sell cheap tat to the dysfunctional and the decorticated. But why? Unlike the BBC and C4, C5 has no government remit, and doesn't need to justify itself to anyone except its shareholders, so why transmit shows like Demolition? Because (as I'm sure they know) the only difference between this programme and a bucket of crap is the bucket.