The success of Little Britain is one of the few aspects of modern life that make me think Richard Littlejohn may be right after all: we really are all going to hell in a handcart. When Ricky Gervais said he thought the show had the potential to be “the new Russ Abbot — and I mean that as a compliment”, he was sadly over-estimating its subtlety and invention. Abbot had the Scots drunkard C. U. Jimmy, Cooperman and a James Bond-like character called Basildon Bond. There isn’t one instance of such deft wordplay in Little Britain. Indeed, as a mark of his better-developed moral aesthetics, Abbot had Bella Emberg on his show — a fat woman who was actually a fat woman, and not a man wearing a grotesque fatsuit, and who was “in” on the “joke ” that she was fat, and was at the very least earning good ITV dollar for her efforts.

It is in Little Britain’s attitude to women that the show displays its most alarming aspects — mainly because it confirms that in this era of Zoo and Nuts and Heat, this is how women are generally regarded. Little Britain’s obsessions are with the extreme taboos of physicality: facial hair, urine, fat, breast milk, faeces, penetration, the anus, decrepitude, arousal, ejaculation, vomit. No blood — that would mean acknowledging death, which would in turn mean some tipping of the hat to the extremes of morality, or emotion, or thought. Little Britain has no time for the extremes of morality, emotion or thought — the hunting grounds of most great comedy (Larry Sanders, Fawlty Towers, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Blackadder, Seinfeld, The Office, The Simpsons, Cheers).

This obsession with physicality peaks in Little Britain’s depiction of women. We know that this is a show about grotesques, but the female grotesques are so much more, well, grotesque. There’s so much aimless viciousness towards female physicality on Little Britain. Take the first sketch in tonight’s show — the opening salvo in probably the most high-profile programme of the year. We join Bubbles de Vere (played by Matt Lucas), the extremely fat, permanent resident of a health farm, as she unexpectedly bumps into her ex-husband and his new wife (played by David Walliams) — a woman who is also extremely fat, with a shelf-like backside and rolls of flesh running down her legs. She is also black, which means that Walliams has blacked up with some gravy-browning and given himself a gigantic pair of lips. In under a minute, Walliams and Lucas have started an argument, torn each other’s towels off and started to roll around naked on the floor. This is the entirety of the joke — that two very fat naked women are having a fight. Their prosthetic fatsuits are crafted, lit and shot in the spirit of repulsion — the cellulite looks like deep jabbing fingermarks left in dough; the breasts are stretched and pendulous; the nipples leathery and dry; the pubic hair long and matted. The scene looks exactly like the kind of thing Clive James would have shown a clip of in the 1980s, while sighing over the juvenile comic aesthetics of the Turks.

There is no equivalent male character on the show — Daffyd, the only gay in the village, might dress ridiculously in skintight rubber outfits from Hoist, but it is Matt Lucas’s own body, and an aspect of gay culture that he is parodying as a gay man. When Walliams drags up as an old lady with incontinence who spends a whole sketch urinating on the floor of a supermarket, the inference is entirely different. But then, the combination of a gay man and a serial womaniser who favours white leather driving caps was never going to be at the forefront of feminist female physical representation.

Of course, the sensible thing to do with a show that is little more than a rip-off of the vastly more subtle and daring League of Gentlemen, but rendered in the style of a Benny Hill sketch, is to ignore it. After all, with despicably weak sub-fifth-form lines such as: “If you collect enough tokens from the back of Cocopops and send them off, you can be prime minister”, this clearly isn’t a programme for adults. But then, it isn’t a show watched by adults. Little Britain has a huge child audience — teachers report children as young as 4 repeating the catchphrases. I couldn’t care less about children repeating poo or bum-sex gags — these are the very essence of being 9 and allowed on the bus on your own. But I feel drearied by the idea of a future generation of comedians whose formative influences will be a combination of misogyny, viciousness and over-cooked surreality (“Welcome to the town of SpongeBob SquarePants!”). I wish the school of Little Britain would burn down.

The new characters

Desiree: the new black partner of Bubbles de Vere’s first husband. She and Bubbles have a catfight, their rolls of fat pounding against one another.

Roman de Vere: Bubbles’s first husband, played by Rob Brydon.

Sir Norman Fry: family values MP who confesses to a sexual indiscretion with “a young Raaa-stafarian” in King’s Cross thus: “I regret to say a part of my body accidentally entered him.”

Ting Tong Macadangdang: Thai mail-order bride wants a ring on her finger, but will Brummie Dudley oblige?

Mrs Emery: OAP — in Britain, Tom Baker informs us, this stands for “old and putrid” — whose bodily functions make the public feel queasy.