I Love My Country

"Some people loved it, others weren't so keen but that's the nature of true art," comedian Micky Flanagan recently said of BBC One's light entertainment disaster I Love My Country - personally, the only piece of art we'd compared this tripe to is Damian Hirst's big load of rubbish.

Months have passed since I Love My Country stopped being on television, but it doesn't feel that way. The thing has seeped into my bones. It exclusively forms the basis of all my anxiety dreams now. I'm trapped in a Technicolor poundland full of teapots and warped Keep Calm and Carry On paraphernalia. Gaby Logan is dancing madly in front of me, as if she's trying to shake off a spider's web, while Jamelia jerks and spasms around, screaming an atonal oompah version of Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen as she punches herself in the head. "Stop dancing," I scream at her. "I can't!" she screams back through a rictus grin. She's crying now. Meanwhile, Frank Skinner holds a Yorkshire pudding aloft as a sacrificial offering to the godhead Nigel Farrage, and everyone in the studio audience clutches their belly and rolls around in a mechanically mirthless approximation of laughter. It never ends. It never ends.

To appear on I Love My Country is to enter a conspiracy of daftness. There will be rehearsed jokes, there will be flammable wigs, and there will be mum-dancing (we're not looking at anyone in particular, though since you ask, Gabby Logan does have children). The guests (and the viewers) who let themselves go tend to have the best time of it, but specialist subjects help, too. On Frank's team, Edith Bowman reaps the rewards of the question-setter's twin obsessions with music and Scotland, while, faced with too much random general knowledge, team-mate Rebecca Adlington wails good-naturedly, "I'm 23! I don't know these things!" She's not going to be humiliated - the whole thing is, of course, relentlessly good-natured - but she might just find out how many people listed heavy metal as their religion in the last census. Every day's a school day.

A shapeless shambles - and now I've decided to emigrate

Does the condescending BBC really believe that we're so stupid we'll tune into any old crap as long as it's patriotic?

TV review: I Love My Country

What delivers the death blow to I Love My Country is its choice of host. Gabby Logan is a perfectly competent presenter, but she does not do fun or spontaneous, and subsequently spent the entire programme looking like a strict schoolteacher struggling to let her hair down on the last day of term.

Last Saturday I watched Micky Flanagan, one of Britain's finest stand-ups, employed by BBC 1 to help place a large Yorkshire pudding on a map to prove he knew where Peterborough was, as pop star and game-show favourite Jamelia sang "All You Need Is Love" in a club style. I Love My Country on BBC 1 aims to capture the Olympic 2012 spirit in a tightly formatted game show. It is the show Shooting Stars with Vic and Bob would have been if the BBC had got its way. More rules, more points, more logic, more enforced zany antics. I watched for 20 minutes and, with a growing migraine, realised I love my country but I also love the television off and the pleasant sound of silence.

Watching I Love My Country (BBC1) was like being trapped in a hyper-active toddlers tea-party where all the kids had eaten too much jelly and ice cream and were on some manic sugar rush.

The audience giggled itself silly at anything and everything, the rival teams jumped up and down and clapped themselves for getting stupidly easy questions right.

Yes folks, welcome to BBC1's idea of Saturday tea-time entertainment. The absurdly ubiquitous Gabby Logan as a jigging cheerleader ('Us Brits love a good shindig'), Frank Skinner in a spangly red bra, massacring the samba and the Mayor of Wycombe on the scales for a Guess The Weight competition. Your average village fête has more inspired ideas than this.

The over-arching theme here, and I'm being kind, is an attempt to tail-gate the feelgood mood of post-Olympic Britain with a quiz that celebrates the joys and eccentricities of national life.

Well, if the mood of Britain 2013 is a demented holiday camp, then I Love My Country got it spot on.

I Love My Country: idiot TV at its worst

What would you get if you crossed a Ukip rally and A Question of Sport? Probably something like this jingoistic mess.

'I Love My Country' debuts with 2.96m on BBC One

I Love My Country debuted with 2.96m viewers on Saturday (August 3), overnight data suggests.

I Love My Country review

I thought I Love My Country was fun and enjoyable.