Even by the standards of Mock the Week, the joke is feeble, barely a joke at all, but the potentially bathetic moment is saved by Lucy Porter, one of the few comediennes to appear on Mock the Week. "I'm doing it next week and what I really don't want to be thinking is, ‘Oh what's Frankie Boyle doing right now?'" she says.

When the testosterone is flowing, the worst thing a woman can do is try to be one of the boys. "Well it's a safe bet Lucy," Boyle snaps. "To be honest, even if I'm not watching it's just that time of day."  

The audience cheers. Boyle knows that the BBC's managers will not complain about a male guest telling a woman that he will be masturbating next time she is on television. The Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis established her superiors' indifference when she confronted the BBC's director-general with a Boyle line last year. O' Briain had asked the panel to come up with "things the Queen would never say during her Christmas speech," and Boyle replied, "I'm now so old my pussy is haunted."  

Mark Thompson would not condemn him, waffling to Maitlis that he could "only judge in the context of the programme". If he watched the whole programme, perhaps he would realise that Mock the Week feeds on resentment. Pornography has many consequences, but the clearest is to increase male resentment of women who, apparently, are giving sex freely to everyone except those numb, hollow-eyed masturbators staring at them on their screens.

The show has also worked out that there is market in appealing to resentment of the elderly, which is growing as the population ages and the costs of looking after them become ever steeper. It targets them with an affectionless frequency that I have never seen before.

Here is Boyle again, responding to a question about the BBC's decision to replace the 66-year-old Arlene Phillips as a presenter on Strictly Come Dancing with a younger model. "What's the big fuss about her getting sacked, eh? It's show business, Arlene, not ugly business... It's not like she's completely disappearing from TV. Straight after this, she's going to be on live autopsy with Gunther von Hagens, and then she's back on our screens at Christmas being chased by the Ghostbusters."

Several observers have said that search engines are leading men to discover perversions they never knew they had. A generation before they could have got through their lives without ever having the opportunities that the computer age provides to learn they had a compulsive interest in high heels or bestiality.

Similarly, Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable.