Someone on Facebook requested tips for a good Hallowe’en horror film. Poltergeist! The Shining! Blair Witch Project! - these were the suggestions, so I lent my opinion and advised them to stop fooling with trivial horror and watch Threads.

Threads? Never heard of it. Threads? That cheap BBC thing. Threads? It’s just about war and that.

So I looked on YouTube for a clip of that film – the film which implanted obsessions and nightmares in me as a child and, even now, makes me flinch whenever I see a flash or hear a whine in the air.

I found a short clip and posted it to Facebook to try and lure my friends away from their daft poltergeists and ghosts, but couldn’t resist watching it myself even though I’ve seen the images before and, once seen, they can’t be forgotten.

So I watched people crying and screaming, burning and melting, and I got hideously depressed. No other reaction to Threads is possible; after the initial horror comes a deep depression.

And it was in this stricken frame of mind that I started watching Citizen Khan. Now, I’m perfectly aware that I shouldn’t have done that. I hate Citizen Khan; I cannot state it in more simple terms: I hate this sitcom, but I was determined to watch its new series with an open mind. Perhaps things will have changed. Maybe this fourth series would somehow be different from the one, two and three hideous series which went before it. Sit down, Julie, with a clear, untroubled mind and give this show a fair hearing. Think happy thoughts….

Fat chance. I was going into this episode burdened by its dreadful history and having just watched the nuclear holocaust unfold on YouTube. Naturally, then, I hated it but even if I’d spent the last three days watching videos of puppies softly snoozing, of buttercups bobbing in meadows, and of unicorns lapping at moonlit ponds I’d still be twisted with bile and ridicule at this appalling comedy.

I don’t need to embellish the plot to let you know how bad it is; I’ll simply relate it: Mr Khan wants to be Birmingham’s new town crier so he fashions a hat made from Cornflakes packets and bursts into the living room to announce “Oyez! The downstairs toilet is officially blocked”. Then he jokes that’s he’s able to combine being a town crier with his current employment because he’s “a proper Pakistani: two jobs!”

Then the family pile into his yellow Mercedes for an outing to a stately home, Farley Manor, where there are yet more toilet jokes, and Khan manages to meet the lord of the manor and talk him into issuing an invite to a posh dinner involving local bigwigs or, as Khan sees it - because this is a COMEDY – it’s a chance to “rub my elbow in some big knobs.” And, yes, how good of Lord Anstruther to be so sympathetic to the Asian community, “to show that you’re down with the brown!”

Comedy is supposed to confound your expectations but every joke (the term used so loosely you could swing it round your head and lasso the moon) is utterly predictable. When a sword is going to fall and smash you know it. When the old woman mutters something after being so long in Lord Anstruther’s toilet, you know it’s going to be “I’d give it five minutes…” When Khan demands, “Take your hands off the bag!” you know he’s referring, not to the bag, but to the old dear holding it. It’s tiresome, embarrassing stuff and it’s being brought to us by our national broadcaster, not a bunch of amateur dramatics weirdos who’ve just set up their own YouTube channel.

And the cast? They have the pained, deliberate enunciation of panto actors on stage in a paint-peeled seaside town; they’re a numbed, sad crew who aren’t wishing for anything better- they know this is their lot and they’re determined to make us suffer through it with them.