MY OWN prime-time show on BBC One, or at least a tiny bit-part in Grumpy Old Men, cannot be long delayed. I am a star, or at least I was until driven back into obscurity by a cat flushing a lavatory.

Inspired by the success of geriatric 1927, a gently spoken pensioner who has become the unlikely hit of the internet, I posted a four-minute video of myself on YouTube, the website of the moment viewed by 100 million people every day to watch an astonishing array of self-indulgence. It’s the modern version of home movies, and anyone can submit virtually anything for the world to see.

The benchmark was not only the anonymous pensioner but George Galloway; a clip of his interview on Sky News in which he berated its Lebanon coverage has had 208,841 viewings in ten days.

A film of me watching paint dry would no doubt have attracted its niche audience, but I chose instead to have a modest rant about what is wrong with my native heath beyond Hadrian’s Wall.

There are two criteria of success on YouTube; the raw number who choose to call up a particular offering, and the number of stars they award it for entertainment value. Nerves were as taut as fiddle strings as the video was fed into the system late on Wednesday afternoon.

Thursday morning brought the deepest joy. A massive total of 81 people had viewed it, but more importantly, the ten who had bothered to rate it had awarded it the maximum five stars. In YouTube parlance, four stars is “pretty cool”; five is “awesome”. The gentle pensioner has four and a half stars.

The viewing figures might not have gladdened the heart of a terrestrial TV channel controller, but during Thursday morning it rose from 93rd most-watched video in the website’s news and blog section to 34th out of 2,789 posted that day. The effect was dizzying.

Then we cheated. An e-mail giving details of the link to the site was transmitted to all users around the Times office, and within five minutes the rant had attracted 100 extra viewers. Miraculously, the five-star rating held.

YouTube is interactive, and viewers can post their comments. By lunchtime yesterday the rant had attracted a grand total of three; vanity demands their reproduction in full.

“Quite brilliant,” said the first. “This is fantastic, meaningful, insightful and at times very poignant,” said the second. “What is the screensaver logo in the background?” asked the third.

A niggling suspicion remains that they were all inside jobs. Either that or the great web-viewing public is entirely devoid of any critical faculty.

So we widened the net. We alerted our political correspondent in Edinburgh to put the word around the Scottish Parliament that I was being rude, not only about their preposterously expensive building but what went on inside it.

Richard Baker, a young Labour MSP, viewed the rant and responded with alacrity. “The guy seems to have been away for quite a while,“ he told The Times. (Well, I did admit that I had lived in England for nigh on 40 years, so no meaningful insights there.) “He is ignorant of the efforts of the Old Firm to tackle sectarianism, ignorant of Holyrood winning the Stirling Prize for architecture, and ignorant of the success of the ban on smoking in public, which has been welcomed throughout the country.”

Good man, Richard; keep going. “He argues that all the intelligent Scots have fled to England. Well, the crassness of his comments suggests he certainly isn’t one of them, and it is a blatantly ridiculous argument anyway.”

The smirk of stardom began to fade. Perhaps I had already exceeded my Warhol quota of 15 minutes’ fame.

The fleeting apogee of my stardom came mid-morning yesterday, when my viewing total had reached a lame 444. YouTube informed me that on Thursday I had been the 14th highest-rated attraction of the day in the news and blog category, the 51st highest-rated of the week and the 88th most- viewed offering in 24 hours.

Too many people had started to view it. Some may not have been my friends, colleagues or family. I assume this from the fact that my rating fell from five stars to four. The descent from awesome to merely cool can really wound a man.

I began to feel like Chesney Hawkes, the one-hit wonder who topped the charts in the 1990s with I Am the One And Only and was never heard of again.

In truth, I blame the cat. At about the same time as I entered do-it-yourself cyberspace, some other contributor posted a home video of a cat obsessively flushing a lavatory. It did this over and over again, but it was never once rude about the Scots.

At the same moment that my rant had registered a total of 444 hits, the cat had clocked up 105,000. My only solace was that the 1,937 viewers who had bothered to rate it had given it only four and a half stars.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Anne Darwin's performance of a lifetime
• Renaissance for canals as new boaters come aboard
• Case study: forced to marry a cousin at 17