The need to put our own house in order

David Cameron's name soon cropped up. "I would still like to shag him,'' remarked comedienne Jo Brand. Or maybe she said: "I could still shag him." Anyway, shagging the Tory leader was the essence. The audience guffawed.

Someone joked about Cameron being "headless".

Brand suggested that this might improve him as a shagging prospect. More hysterical laughter.

I switched off. Within the hour I tuned in again for the Ten O'Clock News. I caught the end of a comedy sketch by a pair named Armstrong and Miller. Hitherto unknown to me, they sang a spoof parlour song, which asked: Have You Ever Had a Shit on a Train? Audience beside itself with mirth.

The credits rolled, but, in the modern manner, there was a coda. A man arrived at a shop just as someone inside was turning round its open card. Instead of closed it read: f*** off. Final peals of laughter.

Our culture is now debased, and it is easy to understand the backlash that seeks to destroy the Western way of life altogether. That this backlash, requiring the deaths of people who do not subscribe to the values inherent in the gutter humour I have described, is as debased as its target is not the point. Perhaps before we argue, for instance, that Muslim women should not wear the veil, we need to put our own house in order.

O N the evening in question I was reading the Journalism of Charles Dickens. It's interesting that he was writing for the masses. So much for education, education, education.

Pieces on, say, the workhouse, or a "home" for homeless women are fascinating history. But it is amazing how often Dickens is directly relevant to today.

One article touches on what we now call stalking - in Dickens' instance of a woman friend who was pestered by a barrister. Tried for falsely claiming she owed him money, he reduced her to tears in the witness box. Re-arrested later, he obtained his release through a legal loophole.

But when he bothered a cousin of Queen Victoria, he was swiftly dumped in a lunatic asylum.

Dickens noted: "It is remarkable how brisk people are to perceive his madness the moment he begins to trouble royal blood."

Equally hitting a timeless nail is a piece entitled Nobody, Somebody and Everybody. Provoked by the failure of a Board of Inquiry to find anyone to blame for debacles in the Crimean War, including the Charge of the Light Brigade, he wrote: "It was Nobody who ordered the fatal Balaclava charge. The non-relief of Kars was the work of Nobody, and Nobody has justly and severely suffered for that infamous transaction."

Going wider, he observed: "In civil matters Nobody is equally active. When a civil office breaks down, the breakdown is sure to be in Nobody's department... Wherever failure is accomplished, there Nobody lurks. With success he has nothing to do. That is Everybody's business."

Nobody's current triumph, of course, is the shooting of the innocent Brazilian Charles de Menezes. On the Today Programme John Humphrys put it to the Home Secretary: "So nobody carries the can?" Nearly right. It needed a capital N.