Whilst watching Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe on BBC4 I was particularly struck by a computer game ad from the 1980s featuring Morecambe & Wise. This 30 second clip managed to sum up for me something I have kept a secret for years; I don’t think they’re funny and never have.

Now, I take no pleasure in speaking ill of the dead, and I’m more than happy to accept that humour changes, diversifies and evolves across the decades BUT Morecambe & Wise are just terrible. Their double act seems predicated on the man-child like Ernie Wise being berated, criticised and upstaged by the malevolently unfunny Morecambe who comes across like a scary Uncle forcing laughs out of the guests at his niece’s Bar Mitzvah.

But what of their Christmas specials I hear you cry! Don’t you know they were watched by 28 million people you ignorant cur!? Well yes, that is true, but in those days there were only three channels available and fuck all else to do on Christmas day apart from drink Tia Maria and curse the IRA’s escalating mainland campaign. Also, 9.5 million people watched Little Britain and that is so utterly shite that I’d rather submit to a dirty weekend in Bognor Regis with grotesque LB star Matt Lucas than watch a second of him and that sociopath David Walliams ripping the arse out of a joke about a guy in a wheelchair who can -wait for it folks- actually walk! Oh my aching sides. Fetch the medicine dear, I fear I’ve done myself an injury.

And I really don’t buy the idea that Morecambe & Wise were ‘of their time’, as if humour has changed so much since then. Comedians like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce were working at the same time and their material is as funny today as it was then. That’s before you even mention a timelessly hilarious double act like Laurel & Hardy, or brilliant ensembles like The Marx Brothers, whose word play and anarchic sensibilities seem remarkably modern even by today’s standards.

I loathe nostalgia, so I have no time for those terrible programmes that always crop up around this time of year showing knackered clips of old Christmas shows and extolling the virtues of a time when the whole family hunkered round the TV to watch the Morecambe and Wise holiday specials. The song and dance numbers involving celebrities of the day are enough to make you voluntarily agree to be placed in a Josef Fritzl style rape-basement for the rest of your natural life.

Perhaps Morecambe and Wise fulfilled a very important role in British society; producing comedy entertainment for people who have no sense of humour. The compulsion to laugh is arguably as vital to human sanity as crying, breathing and wanting to subject Chris Moyles to a vicious public flogging. After all, even the most humourless bastard needs to laugh, and sometimes their ‘mad’ mate Dean who once pissed into his own mouth on a stag night in Prague just won’t cut it. So we point these half wits in the direction of a ‘comic’ to unburden themselves of the pent up aggression that they would otherwise channel into strangling a prostitute or bitter, right wing rants on Talk Sport phone ins. I mean, how else can you explain the popularity of Catherine Tate, 2 Pints, Horne & Corden, Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show, anything involving the terminally unfunny Avid Merrion, or rubbish panel shows like Would I Lie To You and 8 Out of 10 Cats? For me these programmes are actively depressing, and this is coming from a guy who recently watched Midnight Cowboy, Magnolia and The Deer Hunter back to back.

But nothing makes me want to smother myself with a Morrisons carrier bag filled with slurry quite like the site of Morecambe and Wise doing that weird little dance that they performed at the end of their show. Something about it brings to mind the terrifying May Day parade in The Wicker Man in which a dragged up Christopher Lee does a disturbingly po-faced jig alongside a bunch of murderous island folk wearing crude animal masks. There is a nightmarish quality in both instances, a sense that reality is folding in on itself and warping the coordinates of normalcy. God it’s unbearable.

Like I said, I take no enjoyment from criticising two dead guys or upsetting their legions of fans but the past is the past, let’s leave it there and move on. And for all the mouth breathers out there I’ve been assured there are two Doctor Who specials this Christmas.