You know what sells papers? I mean apart from WH Smith and the chaps who emerge at mid-afternoon to sit behind newsstands yelping apparently unrelated consonants at passers-by. What sells papers is doom and, if it can be squeezed in, a little bit of gloom.

This doom and gloom takes three distinct forms. (Four if you include the letters page of the Daily Mail, which is so chock full of the stuff that it can't be long before it collapses under its own immense weight and becomes some kind of black hole.) By far the largest contingent is Current Doom (which, with a slight change of spelling, is by a strange coincidence the name of a pudding my granny used to make). This presents us with an unfolding picture of the world in which we live, run by cavilling shysters, populated by life-addled minor celebrities and riven by soundbite-spewing demagogues whose levels of cultural and historical misunderstanding are so deep that they make callers to Any Answers sound like A.J.P.Taylor.

Then there are the Past Doom sections, in which papers reprint articles from their archives as though to prove that not only are we going to hell in a handbasket, but that we've been doing so for long enough that we might well have to take the handbasket in for a service.

But by far the most futile are the Future Doom articles, which aim to paint a picture of what things will look like at the handbasket terminus. These predicted futures differ widely in scale. One article might forecast a minor logistical dystopia in which, say, the means to make retractable Biros is lost because of the overmining of springs and we are forced to hold down the little clicker on the top of our pens, causing an epidemic of thumb blight. Another might insist that the Universe is going to explode. Still another might find a mid-point somewhere between those two. What each has in common is that the future they predict is pretty much an absolute certainty. But they can't all be right.

Let's take this week's papers as an example. On Wednesday we were met with dismal headlines insisting that there will be 1,000 miles of traffic jams in this country by 2037. “2037?” you might say. “But that's very nearly twenty to nine — rush hour will be long over by then.” No, my idiot friend, 2037 as in The Future, by which time the authors of this prediction are adamant that the whole bally motorway network will be like Ikea on Boxing Day unless the Government builds precisely 373 miles of new lanes a year. On the same day there were articles projecting a UK population of 108 million by 2081 and wondering where we are going to put them all. (I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that I'm going to be investing heavily in the bunk-bed manufacturing sector.)

At a very basic level it's difficult to see how these two visions can be part of the same future: precisely how are the members of this mushrooming population to be conceived if the ones doing the conceiving are stuck in a thousand miles of traffic their whole lives? Short of a massive abandonment of public decency (which would never happen, as it would be in direct contravention of the Highway Code), such a national gridlock would be the ultimate prophylactic.

But then, even the certainty of this übercongestion is called into question by the other things we've been assured will happen. You see, 2037 is 30 years hence, and from about 1950 onwards there's been a general assumption that 30 years from wherever you happen to be it's reasonable to assume that one or all of the following will be widely available: jet-packs, flying cars, a monorail system about three hundred feet up in the air. These will negate the need for cars and leave the motorways entirely for the use of lorries. I daresay that will come as a surprise to many lorry drivers, who seem to think that it already is.

Although, the one real sticking point with the vision of a rosy future built around a fun-based transport infrastructure is that when we take still more Future Doom articles into account, we realise that these much-vaunted jet-packs will only finally be perfected about four days before the oil runs out.

My point, I suppose, is that if you wish to receive sober guidance and reasoned predictions concerning the likely fates and destinies of people and planet, reading the papers can tell you only one thing of any use or certainty: there'll be another Future Doom article along any minute.

Chris Addison is a writer, actor and stand-up comedian

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