And right now, the subject that Jamie Oliver has decided to get most passionate of all about is British drinking culture. Jamie Oliver has told a French magazine that he’s dismayed at how British people would rather get hopelessly drunk than enjoy a delicious platter of painstakingly-prepared food.

No shit Sherlock. Have you ever tried throwing a chair through a pub window after eating a big roast dinner? You’d be lucky not to get a stitch. Jamie Oliver, you really are an enormous goon.

Everyone knows that getting drunk is the best thing in the whole wide world. The camaraderie, the relaxed inhibitions, the stumbling, the chlamydia, the gigantic skull-cracking headache the next morning that makes you want to kill yourself – yes, being shithammered is possibly the best thing in the universe.

But readers, it’s something that Jamie Oliver wants to ban. The great big sod.

You see, in recent years Jamie Oliver has become a sort of big-tongued crusader who’s at his happiest when he’s out on the street tirelessly drumming up support for one campaign or another. In recent years, Jamie Oliver has attached his firebrand mindset to the following:

* Making children eat delicious school dinners

* Banning battery-reared chickens

* Training poor people to be chefs

* Sort of making people in England cook a bit like the Italians do or something

* The wonderful – and barnstormingly inexpensive – variety of food that’s available to buy at Sainsbury’s. Sainsbury’s: try something new today

* The angelic sounds of Toploader

* Pronouncing his wife’s name in a way that makes him sound like a farting hippo.

And now it’s onto binge drinking. Even though binge-drinking is as traditional a British pursuit as foxhunting, smoking indoors and tutting at foreigners in the street, Jamie Oliver has strolled over to France to complain that British people would rather get bladdered on alcopops than enjoy a terrine of Fois Gras. Jamie told Paris Match magazine:

“People have huge TV sets – a lot bigger than mine – state-of-the-art mobile phones, cars and they get drunk in pubs at the weekend… their poverty shows in the way they feed themselves. I found the cooking of the inhabitants of the slums in Soweto a lot more diverse than ours… I think a lot of English people’s food lacks heart. It’s bland.”

Actually, we have to agree with Jamie Oliver here – the people of Soweto have every reason to be proud. True, they have to deal with the spread of AIDS, rampant crime and violence, a higher infant mortality rate and much lower life expectancy, but never let it be said that they can’t make a lovely sandwich.

However, we absolutely can’t let Jamie Oliver proceed with this awful campaign of his. If he had his way and Britain gave up its dependency on alcohol then there’d be no more Booze Britain-style TV shows. Imagine a world where you can’t spend 30 minutes watching grainy CCTV footage of screaming chavs bottling each other on a minor digital channel. Is that really a world you want to live in?

Yes, he served three years in a Vietnamese prison for molesting young girls, but when he eventually gets back to Britain – where seemingly everyone in South East Asia is trying to make him go – he’s not going to be able to sit back, relax and record his new album as he said he wants to.

Though we are convinced that being a convicted kiddy fiddler wouldn’t stand in the way of chart success.

But Gary Glitter is making it all rather hard on himself, by refusing to travel back to the UK to face his further punishments. Instead he’s running about like a paedo-Benny Hill from airport to airport around the Asian region he was kicked out of, being turned away from one country then the next as everywhere locks arms with the sole purpose of keeping him out.

Now we’re all for human rights, we can be surprisingly liberal and we believe in equality for all – but we can’t help but find all this delightfully funny. No one likes you Glitter, and no one wants you.

After being released from prison on Tuesday, Glitter was placed on a flight that would connect him back to Britain. On reaching hecklerspray’s homeland he would be met by police who would – after presumably stopping him from getting lynched by an angry mob, like we’re so good at forming in this country – make the glam-rock-pederast sign the sex offender’s register. His location and movements would then be monitored in a very thought policey way, though he’s a convicted child molester so we can make an exception for that particular Orwellian nightmare.

That was the plan, at least.

Instead, Glitter made sure he missed the connecting flight from Bangkok to Blighty by feigning first a heart attack, then a sudden bout of tinnitus. After waiting in the transit lounge for 24 hours, he accepted the offer of a flight to Hong Kong – probably expecting no one to have heard of him, what with that particular region having no connection whatsoever with Great Britain.

So it must have come as a real shock when he was refused entry to Hong Kong and instead forced to board a flight back to Bangkok, lest he be arrested for illegally being in the country.

If it were anyone else you really might feel a twinge of sympathy for them… oh well.

According to The Sun – a newspaper that once printed a countdown to when an underage popstar would be legal, yet at the same time prides itself on being something of a moral crusader – Gary Glitter said this while on one flight:

“God, am I happy to be leaving Vietnam and that jail. I should never have been in there.”

Though unconfirmed, one report (that we just made up in our head) suggests a response to this was:

“Shut up you fat old paedo, shave that beard off that makes you look MORE like a paedo and stop doing dodgy things with kids. You paedo.”

Unfortunately it would seem that Glitter will have to return to his home nation at some point, and stupid international law dictates that we have to let him in. As Colonel Voravat Amornvivat stated:

“We have to expel him to Britain, his homeland and the only country which must allow him to enter as he’s a national.”

Oh well, at least we know that if he survives the inevitable lynching, the press won’t ever leave him alone. Plus his new album will probably be shit.