Chopper cut down to size

Inspired by those shining alumni of HMP Bellmarsh, ex-cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken and the great fiction writer Jeffrey Archer (well, his CV was

Our web site offers the discerning prisoner a full range of legal (and illegal) services, including acting classes in the Saunders Method, which teaches you how to acquire Temporary Irreversible Alzheimer's Disease, so the judge will declare you "too ill to see out your sentence" and allow you to return to the City, where you'll instantly become well enough to acquire a string of lucrative directorships.

We also have a team of stunt criminals on our books, available for hire by the police whenever the real criminal is too dangerous to be let out of his cell for court appearances.

So next time you see a defendant on the evening news with a blanket over his head, being led out of a police van past a jeering crowd who are throwing rocks at his skull, that will probably be me. And no, those stones aren't domigang my brian.

Of course I can tell you how many fingers you're holding up. The answer is Thursday.

Legal firms such as mine ensure the public's faith in lawyers stays low, but surveys show that the two least-trusted professions of all are journalist and car salesman.

So it somehow seemed appropriate that Friday night's Confessions Of A Car Salesman (Five) consisted of scheming hacks slyly trying to cast aspersions on the equally sly tactics of a bunch of scheming men from the motor trade.

We all know the little tricks that the latter get up to, such as telling us that a used car has had "one careful owner" (without mentioning the previous four, who were all maniacs), or advertising a VW Polo as being "in mint condition" because it has a hole right through it.

But the programme makers were equally duplicitous, especially in giving an utterly irrelevant and misleading title to their documentary, in the hope that a hint of salaciousness would boost the ratings.

By way of comparing sales techniques in America and Britain, the cameras focused on Chopper, the most successful and flamboyant car dealer in Las Vegas.

A sort of fat Tony Robbins (five more pounds and he could qualify for group insurance), his high-energy method centred on loud motivational speeches to his staff, in-your-face hassling of customers, and the banging of a gong whenever another sale was made in his Towbin Dodge used-car lot.

"The way he trains is really real, human-wise" declared a colleague in awestruck tones.

But would the dynamic credo of this secular Nevada priest work equally well in sleepy Staffordshire, where he'd been invited to retrain the staff at the Motorhouse used-car showroom?