GOOD news, Amanda Holden. It’s taken four years but finally you can be seen out in public again without the shame of having: “Star of worst sitcom ever,” invisibly emblazoned across your forehead.

That’s right, BBC1’s 2009 circus-based abomination Big Top has been toppled.

So don your hard hats, grab your hi-vis fluorescent jackets and complete a risk management plan for the new title holder, the catastrophically god-awful new series from Ben Elton.

Called The Wright Way, it’s set in a health and safety unit and I think it’s a sitcom because the TV listings said so.

But the evidence from episode one suggests otherwise, right from the opening titles which showed a stick man being electrocuted. He turned out to be the lucky one.

Everything, and I mean everything, about the show is diabolical, from the lame pun in the programme name to the minor point that there’s nothing whatsoever to laugh at, to the material that’s straight from telly’s pre-remote control days.

Seriously, the ground is so well-trodden that they may as well have named this Oxford Street Boxing Day Sales.

There are jokes, for want of a better word, about women taking forever in the bathroom (tee-hee), public toilet push-button taps (chortle), the word “erection”

(snigger), the Nuremburg Trials (slap-a-my thigh) and misplaced receipts (please, stop, my sides).

The dialogue defies belief and the gags are telegraphed to within an inch of their lives: “Would you like me to press (the tap) for you?”

“Yes, but be gentle. The pressure’s a bit erratic...”

SPPPPPLASH!

Wet crotch hilarity ensues.

That’s by no means all. It’s appallingly scheduled (even Big Top got that one right, an early evening slot), acted like a years even production farce, makes Citizen Khan look like Porridge, and half the time seemed to be filing its own self-assessment form: “What we’re looking at here is a complete BALLS UP.”

Because it’s the right-on, politically correct, box-ticking BBC, it took all of one minute and eight seconds before David Haig’s character Gerald Wright announced his daughter’s “lifestyle bombshell” that she’s... a lesbian.

And I’ve no idea which decade the OTT black female cleaner, with a pronounced West Indian accent, is from, although her last screen role was possibly voicing broomwielding, multiple frilly petticoat-wearing Mammy Two Shoes in Tom and Jerry.

Ben Elton must have been either unconscious when he wrote this or he rediscovered a long-lost dust-covered script last seen in his attic, in 1973, inside a cardboard box marked: “Whatever you do, do NOT open.”

Herein lies the mystery. How could the man who wrote The Young Ones and the three classic latest Blackadder series and blazed the 1980s alternative comedy trail (“Double seat, double seat, gotta get a double seat...”) be responsible for this mess?

Somewhere along the line, probably while he was writing We Will Rock You, Ben Elton has forgotten how to do comedy.

Because, with the possible exception of Ricky Gervais, if anyone else had gone to the BBC with that script, they’d have been laughed out of the office, thereby raising its solitary chuckle.

There is, though, something to be said for Gerald Wright’s love of acronyms which he pointed out: “Speed communication and thus increase efficiency.”

So how’s this for speedy, efficient communication, starting with the show’s title?

TWW.

RIP.

Spudulike awards

● The immaculately-observed 30-second silence by 36,000 London Marathon runners in memory of Boston.

● Olivia Colman in Broadchurch’s finale (even if she did teeter momentarily on replicating a Max Branning fingers-down-the-throat moment).

● ITV News panning from The Kop at Anfield to the Quick Bite takeaway kiosk during its Luis Suarez coverage.

● MC Boy’s show-salvaging rap on Britain’s Got Talent that sounded like Porky Pig trying to say: “That’s all, folks.”

● The revelation, thanks to a Daybreak news report, that the professional body for boob-job surgeons is BAAPS.

● Nina “Zainab Masood” Wadia admitting on Loose Women she doesn’t watch EastEnders.

● The One Show’s Alex Jones asking two-fifths of The Eagles what advice they’d give JLS.

● And Daybreak’s Aled Jones telling boyband Blue: “If your new single doesn’t get to number one, nothing will.”

So the charts end at number two this week.

Spuduhate awards

● The fact BBC2’s The Politician’s Husband, starring David Tennant, about a minister who resigns controversially from the Cabinet, isn’t called Doctor Huhne.

● 10 O’Clock Live’s return not only turning out to be less topical than The Wright Way but, along with This Morning, providing an outlet for the rent-a-gob, faux extremist views of Katie Hopkins.

● BBC2 sending Bill Bailey halfway around the world to prat around with a butterfly net in Borneo, for Jungle Hero.

● Britain’s Got Talent claiming veteran impressionist Francine Lewis, from C4’s Very Important People, as its own discovery.

● The hideous mental image conjured up by TOWIE’s Gemma Collins on This Morning: “I’m a bigger girl, I can’t wear thongs.

They cut in,” which put me right off my jacket potato and grated cheese.

● And the entire nine weeks of Simon Cowell’s Food Glorious Food amounting to a new M&S chicken korma ready meal.

This isn’t just any waste of TV airtime...