Do we need to start culling celebrities? This is the question currently being posed by a number of writers. “It’s not just because there are so many of them these days. Though God knows, that alone would be reason enough to start taking them down,” muses Gilbert Groop, entertainment editor of the Daily Excess. “I mean, once upon a time you actually had to have done something to be famous. Now all you need to do is to have been on some ‘reality’ show seen by three people on an obscure cable channel. Or related to somebody who was on such a show. They just seem to multiply these days, these so called ‘celebrities’.” It isn’t just ‘reality’ TV that the journalist blames for the current glut of supposed celebrities. “If it isn’t ‘reality’ TV then it is those talent shows promoting people with no talent,” he rants, warming to his theme. “You know, just about every day now I see some tabloid story other about some ‘celebrity’ and how they are breaking up with someone, flashing their knockers/knob on the beach or having drunken antics somewhere, and ask myself, who are these people? I’ve never heard of any of them. Yet they fill column inch after column inch.” The internet, he notes, is even worse – not only is it awash with with the doings of celebrities, but just by being on the web you can apparently become a celebrity. “Just set up a You Tube channel and talk bollocks and you are away,” he sighs. “It is getting so that they are like an infestation.”

But, as Groop has indicated, this isn’t the main reason that he and other commentators believe that y we should be considering a cull of celebrities. It is instead because too many of them are ‘going rogue’, suddenly spouting idiotic ‘opinions’ that they clearly think shows their intelligence, but instead reveals them as moronic reactionaries. “Just look at that that Laurence Fox – previously known for being a supporting actor on an Inspector Morse spin off, he appears on Question Time and starts trying to tell us that racism isn’t a problem as long as it isn’t overt,” he opines. “Next thing, he’s all over the press and social media pursuing a ‘war against wokeness’, which is simply revealing him for the dick that he actually is.” Indeed, Fox’s entire fan club has been left disappointed and disillusioned in well swoop by his comments. “Quite literally tens of people suddenly had all their illusions shattered,” says Groop. “This is what these celebrities don’t understand – the human cost of their idiocy.” But, as fellow showbiz writer Tim Hurl, of the Daily Norks, Fox isn’t the only one spouting idiocies. “Who can forget that intellectual giant Meatloaf’s assertion that Greta Thunberg had been brainwashed into believing in climate change?” he asks. “Clearly, they and their ilk need to be culled before they can shatter the worlds of more adoring fans. The trouble is, though, that if we wait for them to spout idiotic bollocks before we cull them, then the damage is already done.”

According to Hurl, what is needed is some kind of early warning system, to predict the slide into crackpottery and enable action to be taken before it happens. “Years ago I worked with a bloke who thought we should have such a system to give us warning of famous women likely to suddenly come out as lesbians, so that he wouldn’t have to waste time writing them fan mail,” he ponders. “He reckoned that we should have them monitored by spy satellites, so as to see if they were wearing comfortable shoes. Obviously, that was just sexist, but we clearly need something similar to detect the celebrity crackpots.” But even if such a system could be implemented, how best to carry out the consequent cull? Should we just gas them like badgers? Seal them into their mansions, stick a hosepipe connected to the exhaust of a car through the letter box and rev the engine?

Groop believes that more subtlety should be employed. “We should invite them to something they’d be guaranteed to turn up to, like the opening of an envelope, then, when they get there, usher them into a room and get them with the old bolt gun.,” he enthuses. “You know, the humane killer they use on cattle – straight between the eyes, they won’t feel a thing!” Another approach suggested by Hurl would be to set up health spas that were actually death camps. “What they think is a sauna is actually a gas chamber.” he says. “Mass drownings in the swimming pool, perhaps. Tanning booths giving deadly doses of radiation. Or even hot tubs that boil the bastards to death like lobsters!” For Hurl, the ultimate solution would be to set up a fake reality show. “Something like I’m a Celebrity, say, tell them that they have been selected to take part, then just dump them in the middle of a real jungle to be eaten by animals or killed by head hunters,” he suggests. “Either that, or set it up like the real show, but make out sure that all of the challenges are fatal.”

Another option, Hurl suggests, would be rather than using I’m a Celebrity as a template would instead to pattern it after Love Island. “All the blokes could end up falling prey to a murderous femme fatale and the women to a crazy sex killer of the kind found in giallo movies,” he says. “Or maybe they could all end up in a sex dungeon and get rogered to death by huge sex machines.” Hurl believes that these faux game shows could even be televised. “People are so ghoulish that they are bound to tune in,” he says. “Imagine the potential ratings for a version of Big Brother where when contestants go into the ‘Diary Room’, they find themselves sat on an electric chair and fried.” Hurl concedes that the idea of a violent, possibly televised, mass cull of celebrities might sound cruel, but believes that it has to be done. “Right now they poisoning the public discourse with their ill informed drivellings,” he asserts. “If we don’t start thinning them out now, they will completely overrun our media with their asinine antics – it is our only hope for saving civilisation as we know it.”