Viewers of Channel 5 – all eight of them – are in a state of high excitement as Sam Snort’s brilliant, real-life, music industry TV soap prepares to reach its climax.

I refer, of course, to Rock Stars, the series which gives aging hairy dudes one last shot at the big time, as members of a new prog-rock supergroup called Sex.

Early episodes of the show saw Sam and his fellow judges, Ted “The Fuckin’ Nuge” Nugent and Stacey (that chick who used to dance nude with Hawkwind), scouring squats, park benches and prisons, in search of washed-up old hippies, acid casualties and broken-down bikers – in short, anyone who’d ever spanked a plank, smoked a doobie or raised a leather-clad fist in the service of the great god of heavy rock.

Once we’d found what we required, we tempted them before the cameras with the promise of either weed, poontang or, in the more extreme cases, a free course of powerful antibiotics for the treatment of stubborn genital warts.

We then furnished each contestant with an air guitar and asked them to mime to the riff of his or her choice - either ‘Smoke On The Water’ or ‘Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love’ – following which Ted would abuse the stupid bastards from a height, I’d snigger a lot and Stacey would burst into tears and/or take off her top on cue.

Needless to say, the whole thing was a pretty tacky if thoroughly enjoyable experience which could have been more accurately transmitted under the title Pure Shite. However, such is the level of popular demand for this kind of crud nowadays, that Rock Stars achieved a certain cult status, with the result that the media and music industry were out in force at Filthy McNasty’s last Friday night for the long-awaited unveiling of the final line-up of Sex.

Hair Appointments

Sadly, things did not quite go as planned.

First of all, we were forced to dispense with the services of our lead singer, Lance Turnpike, formerly of southern fried boogie meisters Foghat, when we discovered that he’d lied about his age.

Lance, it transpired, is not a sprightly 48, as we thought, but actually 71. Admittedly, he’s an extremely well-preserved septuagenarian – thanks to a blood-changing regimen learned from good ‘ol Keef, apparently – but rules is rules, and we’d made it clear from the outset that you had to be the right side of 55 to have any chance of getting into Sex, as it were.

That said, as a fully paid-up member of the rocker class, Sam has always believed that rules are only there to be broken. Consequently, myself and my fellow judges would have been prepared to overlook Lance’s little white lie about his age, were it not for the fact that he also lied that (a) he could sing, (b) he could talk coherently, and (c) he could stand upright for more than 15 minutes at a stretch.

When it emerged that, au contraire, Lance now spends what few waking hours of the day he has, doing embroidery whilst confined to a bath chair, we were forced to concede that he would not really be up to the punishing schedule of gigs, personal appearances and international hair appointments which we have lined up for Sex.

A further blow came just hours before the unveiling when our fantastic rhythm section of bassist Stig Pippin Inglenook (formerly of Finnish hobbit-rockers Stryder) and ex-Budgie tub-thumper Manmountain Dense, were busted in their hotel for trying to sell a holdall full of skunkweed to an undercover Fed. Bummer.

Worst Shock

That left just three members – or, at least it did until twin-guitarists Rod Robertson and his identical twin brother Rob (formerly of skinny tie, power-poppers The Twins) were both killed instantly when their cars collided with each other on the Naas Road. And in a further eerie coincidence, it was later discovered that both men were listening to Henry Cow CDs at the time of the crash.

A quick bit of rejigging and a hastily typed press release, meant that we were still ready to unveil what we were now calling our winning Rock Idol when, with barely minutes to go to showtime, the Feds raided Filthy’s in force and led away trumpet and keyboard player Professor Freddie “Fingers” O’ Brien in a red jump suit, blacked out goggles, ear muffs and chains, apparently bound for Cuba.

Which seemed a bit extreme, despite the Feds’ insistence that for the past five years Freddie has been living a double life as Ahmed Yasouf Mahood, a member of a marching brass band attached to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

This, as you’ll readily appreciate, was the worst shock yet: with “The Professor” in chains, there was now bugger all chance that his great friend, Angus Moustache, crap amateur musician and editor of The Sunday Demented, would give our project oodles of free publicity in his strange organ.

But were we finished? Fuck no! Tune in next week to find out how we saved the day by renaming our project ‘When Manufactured Bands Go Wrong’ and getting Chuck Norris to do the narration.

Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort esq