With the demise of Dibley’s vicar, home-grown comedy continues its downward spiral, and now, to compound the problem, they’ve neutered the funniest programme ever shown on British television: Ski Sunday.

I like skiing very much. And the thing I’ve always liked most of all about it is flopping into an armchair and watching other people do it for me.

Ski Sunday was always the highlight of my viewing week. In the olden days you had David Vine in the commentary booth, talking us through the brilliance of some tanned and muscular young man from Norway.

You’d marvel at how he made it look so easy, his skintight suit revealing every sinewy twitch and, according to my wife, whether he was a cavalier or a roundhead. But let’s be honest, all of us, really, were waiting for the falls.

Oh sweet Jesus. The falls. They were the best accidents a man can have without actually exploding, and they always went on for hours, a tangle of flesh and ego bouncing down the mountain until it crashed into the crowd in a technicolour explosion of joy, Gore-Tex and snow.

And better still, you knew that after the paramedics had collected all of the limbs and hosed most of the blood off the piste, you were going to get it all over again in super-voyeur slow motion. And it would all be set to David Vine’s completely humourless commentary, which somehow made it funnier still.

We watch the Horse of the Year Show for the same reason. Not because we want to see Sanyo Music Centre score a clean round but because we hope it will brake suddenly, sending Harvey Smith through the fence in an ear-splitting jangle of splintered wood and bone.

Bernie Ecclestone probably thinks we watch Formula One because we want to see Michael Schumacher’s supreme car control. Wrong. If he wants the big viewing figures back he must arrange that in every race some floppy-haired Brazilian playboy disintegrates.

Skiing, however, has always been the best because the contestants are going so fast, and they are protected from the forces of nature by nothing more substantial than a big Durex. We could actually see their arms coming off.

So, a single half-hour of Ski Sunday provided more naked laughs than a million crying babies falling in paddling pools on You’ve Been Framed.

Nowadays, however, the show is presented by two greasy-haired dudes who I suspect may be snowboardists.

Now snowboarding, so far as I’m able to determine, is a sport where you dress up in clothes from the Dawn French Baggy Collection and then ingest as much cannabis as possible. The last man still making sense is the winner. This is not great TV.

Mind you, in last weekend’s episode of Ski Sunday, we were treated to the edifying spectacle of one young chap from America who spent an age plugging an iPod into his ears and selecting the right track before setting off. Much to my intense pleasure, he fell over almost immediately.

Amazingly, the commentary team didn’t seem to realise that any sport where the participants wear iPods doesn’t really cut the mustard. So instead of pointing out that the competitor was an imbecile, we cut straight to a link where one of the presenters was addressing us while skiing backwards through a forest.

I can’t tell you what he was on about because, like absolutely every one of the show’s viewers, I was on my knees, praying to God that he’d slither backwards into a tree. More than a long life full of health and happiness, I wanted to see him try to finish the piece to camera with half a fir tree poking out of his bottom.

This is the whole point of skiing. We don’t flog to the Alps every winter simply because we like the mountain views, or because we want to perfect the stem christie. Mainly, we go because we know that snow’s slippery, and that there’s a good chance we’ll see someone fall over.

Why do you think YouTube is so popular? Because of the irony, or the subtle use of hyperbole in a situation that’s both morally uplifting and tragic? No. It’s banana skin humour: a million billion clips of people falling off bicycles, and as often as not catching fire.

The Office and Alan Partridge were both brilliantly written. My respect for Gervais and Coogan is boundless. But did you ever laugh while watching Dave Brent? I doubt it. Not like you laugh when someone comes a cropper on Deal or No Deal, or trips over a paving stone in the town centre and falls flat on his face.

This is what the Ski Sunday team seem to have forgotten. They showed us how much flare should be in evidence in our skiing pants, and how the glove should be worn in relation to the cuff. And all the time, I kept thinking: “Oh, for God’s sake. Show me a Norwegian falling over.”

Instead, we got a whole segment on snowboarding, and that won’t do. There’s nothing unusual in a stoned Finn getting all wobbly because that’s what people do when they’ve had a spliff. And my wife doesn’t like the big clothes because, she says, she can’t see their tackle.

The whole point of Ski Sunday is to take the ludicrous art of skiing and present it in a sensible fashion. It’s the juxtaposition of the sane and in the insane that works. Someone falling over is brilliant. Someone falling over and then pretending they meant it to happen: that’s comedy gold.

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