THE hot news from the streets is that ticket touting is in crisis. Across the land, scalpers once thigh-deep in used twenties are giving up the game and moving on to other things, such as bar-ownership and prison. It’s getting to the point where the hallowed Cockney street cry — “barney spares” — may soon no longer be heard, gone the way of sweet Molly Malone, and her cockles and mussels, alive alive-o.

We’re in a position to relay this sobering information after managing to obtain two together for this week’s Channel 4 documentary, Touts On Tour. (Very easily, seeing as you ask. It was a buyer’s market on Monday night, what with “I’m A Celebrity” finishing on ITV. Frankly, they couldn’t give them away.)

The touring touts in question were Al Coulston and “Slim” Phil Cooper and by the time Channel 4 left them, Al was concentrating his energies on opening a sports and karaoke bar in Wembley, while Slim was limping back from the rugby union World Cup in Australia, where business had been so miserable that he sidled off to work The Lion King. Imagine the indignity, for a tout as proud as Slim.

And Slim was proud. He was tired of hearing himself and his illustrious peers portrayed as parasitic scum; disappointed at being banned from going within 500 metres of the All England Club during Wimbledon. He was irritated, too, about repeatedly being raided by Trading Standards officers. His view was that touts don’t get the appreciation they deserve. “We’re the best in the world at our job,” he said, which is also, funnily enough, a claim often made by the British Army and English football hooligans.

Slim and Al were blaming the internet. According to them, it’s done to the distinguished trade of touting what central heating did to the coal industry. Or as Slim, in his impotent fury, put it: “eBay — I mean, what a lot of bollocks.” Today’s holder of spares goes online, deals directly with his punter and cuts out the middle spiv.

All of which conspires to take the fun and the margin out of it for the likes of Slim, avidly working the phone at his Harley Street agency. Incidentally, if Slim ever tires of touting as much as Al has, he’d make a great receptionist. At one point we witnessed him pick up the receiver and deliver the immortal sentence: “I’m afraid the person you need to speak to is in prison at the moment.” I’m not sure that even Perry and Croft at the peak of their powers could have come up with a line as good as that.

The Harley Street agency is not in Harley Street, by the way. It’s not even in London — not that this should affect your confidence if Slim ever tells you that your seats are in the front row of the stalls.

Slim wore a tie and a navy blazer with shiny buttons for business and rigorously addressed all men as “sir”, but you didn’t want to get him started on questions of nationality. “Hate the Welsh. Celts, ain’t they, at the end of the day.” Australians were “descended from the filth that we got rid of”. In fact, in a way that was possibly pre-emptive, Slim was altogether big on disgust.

“It’s just disgusting,” he said of a fan who didn’t want to pay face value. “It’s disgusting,” he said again, when a man on the phone asked only £100 to be relieved of his pass for the royal enclosure at Ascot. “I’d have more respect for him if he’d asked £1,000,” Slim’s disgust, one noted, did not extend to hanging up, but you don ’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Particularly not if the horse happens to be running at Royal Ascot.

Slim saw signs of decline everywhere. “The class of people attending Royal Ascot are just not what they was,” he said. But at least there was still honour among touts, many of whom had their identities protected in this programme by a kind of digital Vaseline. At least, I assume that was deliberate. It’s possible that they actually look like that. Maybe the crisis is so bad that today’s tout is literally worrying his face off.

Just keeping up with the language must be pressure enough. If some Hillman offers you a half a stretch for a bottle, but you’ve only got an oddie and you’re looking for a carpet — well, then, it’s obvious that you have become a tout. Fortunately, touts are also fluent in English and will happily use this for their increasingly infrequent dealings with non-touts, including Lawrence Dallaglio, whom Slim had the brass neck to approach outside the England rugby team’s hotel in Sydney in the final hours before last year’s World Cup final.

“Any extra tickets you want to sell, sir?’ Slim asked. And Dallaglio said: “Sure! I’m actually quite busy preparing for the biggest match of my life right now, but meet me round behind the kitchens in half an hour and I’ll sort you out.”

OK, he didn’t. What he actually said was: “Oh, leave me alone, will you?” And ready those violins for Slim because, these days, it’s what the whole world is telling him.