the elephant in the room

Godfrey Bloom has been grabbing the media's attention by suggesting that we shouldn't be sending foreign aid to 'Bongo-Bongo Land'. 'Where is Bongo-Bongo Land?', asked Matthew Bannister, standing in for Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. Search me - within the pages of a 1948 issue of The Beano? Wherein you will also find a character called 'Godfrey Bloom', a blustering old buffer in a bowler hat, apoplectic with fury at the latest outrage perpetrated by Dennis the Menace.

Bloom does at least usefully blur the line between what people call 'common sense' and sheer barking insanity, as if they might finally be revealed as the same thing - which they are, of course.

But the main thing this debacle proved was that people in the media just love the phrase 'Bongo-Bongo Land'. All day they were bouncing it around like a rubber ball – you could hear the pleasure in their voices. Matthew Bannister even referred to the whole thing as 'the Bongo-Bongo ding-dong'.

But if you want bullshit you need to go to the experts. The Dealership is another reality show set in Essex (hooray!), focussing on a used car dealership in Rainham. The undoubted star is genius salesman Jamie, who has a superhuman ability to dispense what he refers to as 'flannel.' So effective is he that I am genuinely afraid that he will sell me a car through the TV screen. Thank God I can't drive.

But he's not the only character. Even the work experience boy, Declan, is showing signs of turning into the next Louis Theroux. And then there's Scott, a former window-fitter, who is struggling to sell anything, despite (as he puts it) 'grafting my balls off'. The problem is he can't express his personality like Jamie can – it's in there (so he maintains) but it won't come out. As a layman, I can only make a tentative suggestion – if he's troubled by self-consciousness, maybe he'd do better if cameras weren't filming him all the time. Just a thought.