Present Tense: There's a film playing in the cinemas at the moment called Dirty Sanchez. Ask your teenage sons about them, they'll know all about it. It features the eponymous troupe engaged in all manner of dumb-headed, nauseating and sado-masochistic stunts, which are loosely strung out along the theme of the seven deadly sins.
Critics have lined up to decry it as foul and vile, a further sinking of the cultural nadir. They make a persuasive point, although at this point I should admit to not having actually seen the movie. But when you grow up in an era of Mary Whitehouse, you're bound to learn a thing or two about moral outrage.
Stars of MTV, Dirty Sanchez are a Welsh version of Jackass, that other delightful bunch of young men who made a fortune from running into things, falling off other things or sticking their faces in a bucket of jellyfish before pouring urine over it to see if it works as a balm. Dirty Sanchez's particular contribution to this popular genre of modern slapstick has been to assess the borders of taste and then run face first at them.
So, before we detail some of their antics, if you're about to take a bite of your Shreddies, you might want to put them down for a moment or three.
Their more notable escapades include collecting as much pubic hair from other people as possible, with the one who collected the least having to eat a pizza topped with the aforementioned collector's item. They have attached weights to their ears and then thrown them over cliffs. They have done things to their private parts that would have them turned away from even the most open-minded Amsterdam nightspot.
They perform live stage shows, and recently drove the Gumball Rally, a Cannonball Run-type car race in which rich and bored petrolheads who want to travel, meet interesting people and scare the living daylights out of them. The Dirty Sanchez boys kept an online diary, the final entry reading: "We lit the fire works but one fell over and hit the crowd! The security guards eventually warmed to our charm though and agreed that the Brits are the Original Kings of Chaos!" Samuel Pepys, you'll agree, has nothing on that.
In short, they mark a generational division: teenage boys love them; their dads don't. Or pretend not to.
Why they bothered to make a movie is one thing, but why people go and see it is another. Not because we should say "down with this sort of thing", but because plenty of this sort of thing is freely available on the internet.
Every day, there are new inclusions in the worldwide hall of stupid stunts. There are people putting themselves in revolving washing machines, launching themselves off moving cars, sticking fireworks up their bottoms and setting fire to their chest hair. Shreddies eaters look away now: if you want to see a college student give himself a beer enema and his friends drink the results, it's available at the click of a mouse.
The level of imagination is staggering. It would make you proud of humanity's ingenuity, if you weren't preoccupied in hoping that a passing alien race is looking in. A few years on the go now, this penchant for filming themselves in painful situations didn't start with Jackass, but with Jeremy Beadle. As soon as You've Been Framed confirmed that there was humour to be had in someone falling off a bike then it was only natural that someone would decide that throwing themselves off one would be even funnier.
A square-headed conservative might observe that a war would thin out their ranks a little.
There is a theory that for a generation of middle-class young man with neither a tough life nor the chance to fight for a pointless death, they have to somehow release that pent up impulse to run headlong into something stupid.
Yet, there is a war on, and at least some of this generation of young Americans and British men are finding themselves learning to run away from big bangs rather than towards them. But the irony is that there is a constant stream of videos coming from Iraq featuring soldiers using their quieter moments to film themselves performing dumb stunts.
"Iraq-ass antics", the News of the World called them when it ran a feature on a home-made video, Gulf War Syndrome, which featured British squaddies jumping between moving vehicles, setting fire to their hair and shooting plastic bullets at a soldier wearing a flak jacket.
"The lads love Jackass and it was a great way to stop thinking about all the death and destruction we saw," one soldier said.
Go to such sites as YouTube and you can watch soldiers blow up washing machines, push over occupied Portaloos, give each other electric shocks, and eat scorpions. They're in one of the most dangerous spots on earth, yet feel the need to mimic a bunch of civilians who've become rich by performing dangerous stunts.
And it's all because of Jeremy Beadle. There's a thesis in there somewhere.
