Singer Barlow who Kept That

Last week on Gogglebox I discovered that I had missed a programme called When Corden Met Barlow. As far as I could tell, this seems to have been a queasily homoerotic road trip in which the actor James Cordon followed the singer Gary Barlow around like a smitten puppy while making an embarrassing twit of himself.

From the snippets shown on Gogglebox, I was happy not to have watched the whole show.

This was doubly so as Barlow has now been exposed as an alleged tax cheat, a story first floated a year ago by the Times newspaper. A judge last week ruled that music investment schemes used by the singer, along with two other members of Take That and their manager, were primarily designed to avoid tax.

Barlow and the others may have to pay tens of millions back. Speaking as a run-of-the-millstone, taxing-paying, empty-pocket druge, I hope Barlow has to stump up handsomely.

As happens nowadays, the Prime Minister felt he had to step into this row, criticising the singer but later adding that he should be allowed to keep his OBE. Cameron told the Times: "I am opposed to all aggressive tax avoidance." Sadly, he is less opposed to running his foot over every little bump in the news carpet. You might have thought prime ministers had more important distractions.

Also on Gogglebox, I was briefly exposed to an over-emoting woman singing her heart out on Britain's Got Some Vaguely Talented People. After exposing her larynx, she exposed her soul, saying that she'd had her heart broken that week. And then burst into tears.

I don't wish to appear heartless, but really.

There are many enjoyable aspects to Gogglebox, not least the box-within-a-box element. You are basically watching people watching television. It's a cosy, oddly comforting experience, even if a degree of artifice will have been involved in its making: this is still television we're talking about, after all.

While this programme is about television on the surface, it is mostly about people. How funny they are. How odd they are. How they respond to each other. And, well, how much they appear to eat.

These families watching up and down the land have become reality TV stars merely by unremarkable merit of being filmed while watching television.

Everyone will have their favourites: the gay hairdressers, the lovable posh pair who appear to like a drink and each other (and are genuinely funny) or those two friends from Brixton who scream the roof off while wolfing mountainous takeaways.

My own favourites are June and Leon Bernicoff, the retired teachers from Liverpool. If I'm around long enough to be a sour and witty armchair grouch of nearly 80, readily equipped with a smart put-down for politicians (especially Tory ones), then I shall take dear Leon as my later-life role model.

THE escaped prisoner known as the Skull Cracker has been caught again. One of the charges Michael Wheatley faces is the rather old-fashioned one being "unlawfully at large". For some reason, this particular offence got me thinking. I began to wonder how long it would be before it became an offence to be "unlawfully large".

So instead of merely having to recapture villains on the run, the police would have to arrest people suspected of being overweight. Never mind the scales of the law, they would have to go armed with scales.

As it happens, quite a few of the people taking part in Gogglebox are at risk of being "unlawfully large", should they ever venture away from their television screens.

A HANDSOME leaflet sporting a picture of David Cameron drops through the door ahead of the European elections. Sorry, David, but you've wasted your money there.

As too did the Labour Party with last week's election broadcast, a jokey mock-Fifties style black and white 'movie' in which Nick Clegg gradually disappeared. What an an embarrassment – matched only by Labour's present slogan: "Hardworking Britain Better Off."

I'm having trouble squeezing a drop of meaning from that verb-less clunky chunk of nothing.