In a development that few cultural analysts saw coming, Ken Bates is the new Ted Moult. Picking up, with typically brazen aplomb, the mantle of the late countryman who, back in the golden age of double-glazing adverts, urged the nation to “Fit the best, fit Everest”, the Leeds United chairman and perpetually bristling controversialist is the new face of Safestyle windows of Bradford.

The television advertisement arising from this spectacular alliance has yet to see heavy rotation in the primetime slots, although, to be fair, news of it got a decent showing on The Glazine, the weekly e-mail bulletin for the glass, glazing and fenestration industries. And, if on an underoccupied afternoon you should happen to be watching repeats of Emmerdale on ITV2, you, too, may be privileged to catch sight of a dashingly bearded gentleman with a twinkle in his eye and a window over his shoulder. (I mean behind him. We don’t see Bates humping the things around. That wouldn’t be dignified.)

The advertisement transports us to the balcony and sitting room of Bates’s sun-dappled retreat in Monaco, where, the implication is, a well-fitted window would certainly shut out the noise of the riffraff and assorted Eurotrash, enabling our host to enjoy in peace the company of his clear-glass coffee table and rather firm-looking armchair.

If Safestyle really is the company Bates chose to fit the windows to his Monte Carlo apartment, it would be slightly surprising. The customer testimonials on the company’s website tend to be from closer and more taxable locations, such as Doncaster and Gillingham. Even so, there can be no denying the lure, wherever you are, of Safestyle’s “buy the front, get the back free” offer, something that, if it could only be adapted for the football transfer market, could make life a lot less miserable for lower-league clubs.

It’s a straightforward ad, but word is that the campaign is about to get more complicated and that, in the planned follow-up, Bates will be seen standing on one side of a Safestyle window and holding one of Dennis Wise’s team sheets. Upon the hallowed instruction, “Let her go, Fred,” a technician on the other side of the glass fires up a giant wind turbine.

Bates then allows the team sheet to drop and, amazingly, thanks to the quality sealings tested and given an all-weather guarantee by this award-winning West Yorkshire company, it doesn’t blow into the hands of a Crystal Palace player.

As Half Man Half Biscuit wrote in the pop classic D’ye Ken Ted Moult?, “Rain, shine or gale force nine/His frames remain intact.” What chance an update for 2007: “D’ye Ken Ken Bates?” These twin champions of the replacement window have more in common than you might think. Moult, of course, was a Derbyshire farmer who turned panel game contestant. Bates, too, was a farmer, in Buckinghamshire, although, admittedly, one for whom Ask Me Another and the dictionary corner on Countdown somehow never came calling.

Another similarity: while Moult is widely credited with pioneering the concept of “pick your own strawberries”, Bates is widely credited with pioneering the concept of “fry your supporters on an electric fence”. It’s the same, laterally thinking, go-ahead spirit.

We should have known something was up when a “platinum sponsorship” deal made Safestyle the “official home improvement partner” of Leeds for the 2006-07 season. Safestyle has a tradition of commissioning celebrity-led advertising campaigns, meaning that the former Chelsea chairman now takes his place in a starry cast list that includes Ken Morley, who played Reg Holdsworth in Coronation Street, Cannon & Ball, the legendary TV funnymen, not to mention Safestyle’s own creation, the “Windowman”.

Inevitably, cynics will look at Bates’s seemingly late-onset passion for the fenestration industry and accuse him of a marriage of convenience.

People will easily imagine him taking a shine to the defenestration industry, but not to the fenestration industry. It may even be suggested that commercial breaks have seen nothing so haunting since Phil “The Cat” Tufnell first signed off on the peerless misery of a loans company commercial with the catchphrase, “Happy days”.

In which case, now, perhaps, would be the moment to tell the story of the time when Bates dragged me into a public lavatory. The lavatory in question was in the recently completed West Stand at Stamford Bridge and the Chelsea chairman was leading a group of journalists on a tour of the new facilities. The particular and sustained fierceness of his pride in the quality of the porcelain fittings and the tiling is still a subject of wonderment among those of us who were fortunate enough to be there that day.

So, why not turn to the confrontational chairman for a steer on decent windows? Let’s face it, he has built more hotels than Ted Moult ever did.