The Celebrity Kneecap Index

Nigel 'Stoathoarder' Sequinhammock was - as we all know - the instigator of the Celebrity Kneecap obsession that is currently transfixing the whole nation. It is, undoubtedly, the first big nationwide craze since people thought that tediously arranging numbers in a grid made you look a bit clever, or that sending drunken out of focus phone pics of your own genitalia was a sure-fire way of impressing members of the opposite sex.

Sequinhammock's Celebrity Kneecap Index first began as a website created when Sequinhammock had, in a spare moment away from his hectic career teaching garden snails how to hang-glide (as a major part of a Inner-City Regeneration scheme set up by the former Labour Government), created a complex formula to rank celebrities according to how interesting their kneecaps seem to ordinary members of the public.

There is nothing the general public enjoys more - apart from the more unlikely sexual shenanigans of otherwise seemingly terminally-dull politicians - than arguing over otherwise pointless lists and rankings. So, consequently, Sequinhammock's catchily-entitled Celebrity Kneecap Index shot to the top of every web popularity chart as people flocked to see which celebrities have the most interesting kneecaps.

The website became so popular that even newspaper opinion columnists began to notice it and hurried to leap on the bandwagon. Some wrote articles in support of the concept, wondering why this vital subject of how interesting celebrity kneecaps were had been kept from the public for so long (maybe, some columnists hinted darkly, there was the whiff of scandal or conspiracy about the secrecy that once surrounded the whole issue of celebrity leg joints.)

Other columnists wasted no time in condemning it as yet another manifestation of the trivia-obsessions that debase our popular culture. The more experienced columnists took pains to be even handed about the whole phenomenon, as they bided their time - of course - in order to see if celebrity kneecap ranking would become just fashionable enough for them, but not too fashionable, and therefore much too vulgar, to associate themselves with.

Sequinhammock himself, however, last week sold his last remaining stake in the Celebrity Kneecap Index for a reported £30,000,000.37p to a major media conglomerate. He has refused to say what his next venture will be, and only time will tell if celebrity kneecap ranking will be, as many commentators have predicted, the Top of the Pops for the 21^st Century, or just another short-lived fad like 'New Labour' or freestyle goat-pondering.