MANGE TOUT RODNEY!

Jean Valjean Martin, er, we mean John, sorry, breaks out his franglais dictionary to talk a little Eurotrash and go goggle-eyed over Lolo Ferrari...

Now I’m not a demographic analyst, but I’d wager that a fair proportion of Infinity’s readership regularly made it home from the pub on Friday nights during the ‘90s and early naughties, quite possibly cradling cartons of curry and cans of offlicense booty, to settle down in front of another thirty minutes of sexy, sleazy and downright surreal Eurotrash.

Channel 4’s brief to be “edgy” has generated some real atrocities down the decades (with Naked Attraction currently taking the banal biscuit for lowest common denominator crud) but this Rapido production was delivered with a soupçon of savour faire and general je ne sais quoi, avec un liberal twinkle dans les yeux de genial gallic hosts Antoine De Caunes and (for the first seven series) that frisky fashionista, Jean Paul Gaultier.

Their tongue in cheek mission “to destroy the moral fibre of your second rate nation” (which sometimes involved De Caunes dressing up as a pantomime version of Prince Charles) was achieved via a succession of Mondoesque reports showcasing the saucy, strange and often simply baffling behaviour of our then EU bedmates, showcasing the difference between British stiff upper lippery and the louche, loopy ways of those garlic and sauerkraut scoffing Continentals. In other words, winding up the Daily Mail’s readership and anyone else deluded enough to believe that sinister agencies in Brussels were conspiring to make us eat square tomatoes.