Peter Kay rides to our rescue

Sunday night was rescued by a chubby man from Bolton dressed as a transsexual on a fake talent show, writes blogger Dan Wainwright.

Peter Kay, dressed as dinner lady Geraldine, exploded back onto TV in a brilliantly observed parody of phone vote talent shows.

In Britain's Got The Pop Factor And Possibly A New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly On Ice we were treated to fresh and original observations from a comic that all the celebs are desperate to be seen with.

Even Sir Paul McCartney put in an appearance to sing, of all absurd things, the Home and Away theme.

And Great Barr's Cat Deeley, playing it straight, reminded us who Holly Willoughby wishes she was.

Pete Waterman was absolutely superb of course. The whole sketch with R Wayne's dying gran, clad in a Princess Diana jumper, gave me so many guilty convulsions of laughter I almost had to visit the little boys' room (and don't get me started on the Michael Jackson bit with the dwarves).

If everyone else in Britain watching laughed half as much as I did then that was probably the best couple of hours' telly throughout the whole of 2008.

This blog was about to be a rant about the terribly tasteless frieze being installed at London St Pancras station which depicts a man throwing himself before a Tube train driven by the grim reaper.

But suddenly I don't care anymore. Nothing annoys me right now. There is a comedy genius out there who has taken everything I hate about our celebrity obsessed culture and ripped into it with a heart significantly lighter than his ample frame.

I have been very disappointed in Kay's recent performance, in that there didn't appear to be any.

He seemed forever doomed to recycle the same stand-up routines about garlic bread and Bullseye, knowing full well that we'd continue to laugh because they were nonetheless still brilliant.

I felt so cheated, addicted to something I was sick of but couldn't let go of because it made me feel better.

The intervening documentary, presumably to allow the watershed to properly kick in before the finale, about his hardly recent tour served only to remind us that for the last three or four years Kay has been an almost one-trick pony singing Amarillo and cracking the same jokes about his mum not even being Irish.

Hopefully we have reached the beginning of a new chapter for Peter Kay. With our finances crumbling around us and recession on the horizon he could save us all with a solution better than anything Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have come up with so far - Laughs.

And plenty of them.