BENEFITS Street is set to make a depressing return to our screens on Channel 4 - and like most trash TV epics it poses a conundrum.

Just who I will end up despising the most at the end of the first episode, as the makers move from Birmingham to Stockton-on-Tees‎?

The TV producers who fill the idiot box with socially-inept 'characters' - or the commissioning editors who sign on the dotted line for this tosh?

'Oh no!', I hear you type, 'it's those workshy scroungers who deserve to be loathed and ridiculed, those feckless sorts who haven't done a decent day's work in their entire lives.'

And ordinarily, as an occasional Daily Mail reader, I'd be inclined to agree wholeheartedly.

Yet even if they didn't have TV crews on their doorsteps, with 'researchers' egging them on to evermore degrading lows, the point is they would still be there, in Teesside and elsewhere.

Because there's nothing more mouthwatering for our TV arbiters than being on the breadline. Or a bit dim. Preferably both.

Even before the next Benefits Street has aired a new anti-hero is gearing up for her turn in the lowlight. The newly-dubbed Orange Dee, a perma-tanned gran with a regrettable employment record is just aching to share her wisdom and shuffle sideways to Channel 5 for one Big Brother variant or another.

Strike me down though, but in a world where the Made In Chelsea squad are sent out to New York, those wastes of of oxygen from Geordie Shore are indulged with beach holidays, where will it all end?

It's the kind of mentality which saw the BBC malign a working-class estate in Blackburn for some cheap programming, and earn many residents' undying emnity‎ in East Lancashire.

Tiny devices can bring you the weekend's football or rugby from any corner of the globe, bullet trains can zoom travellers at 225mph (though not around here clearly), nano-technology may revolutionise medicine and more.

And for your entertainment‎, some maladjusted folk, not doing an awful lot, except act as puppets for a bunch of conscience-free middle-class ghouls. What's on Radio Four again?

‎* It's not often this column provides a valuable public service to anyone, not even me.

But here is a piece of free and valuable advice, especially for those who drive across the Tesco car park regularly.

That bit of black and white striped highway, with the flashing beacons, outside the HJ? Just because it's on supermarket territory, the Highway Code still applies.

Just ask former councillor Pauline Nelson who, like myself, took her life in her hands trying to make it to safety after the Huddersfield game.