The Man On The Street’s intended column was narrowly pipped by a deadline last month, but on the upside, waiting four extra weeks for your correspondent’s views on ITV’s Game Stars means that sensitive readers will have to put up with a lot less swearing.

That’s not to say that, on reflection, Game Stars was any less poor than your reporter initially thought it was. For most of the show, The Man On The Street’s flesh was in considerable danger of crawling right off, and even a month later, thinking about the show is enough to enduce cold shivers. Jade Goody wobbling onto the stage still gives your correspondent nightmares, and may well do until the end of days.

Some of The Man On The Street’s incredibly small and ever-shrinking handful of friends in the videogames industry were involved in the production of the show, so we won’t dwell on the aesthetic shortcomings – hey, it was the first try. (Though the cultural cringe of the games biz, displayed to such good effect in Game Stars, is something we really ought to get round to addressing one day. Witless Z-list celebrities getting plenty of airtime, yet the camera cutting away the instant an award recipient – the people the awards are supposed to be honouring and bigging up, after all - get out of their chair. No matter how rich the games industry gets, we never seem to get over the embarrassment of making silly little games instead of proper artistic works like, ooh, the S Club movie or something.)

No, what your reporter would really like to talk about is this – even if the show had been directed by James Cameron or Stephen Spielberg, would it have been a good idea in the first place? The organisers are keen to portray Game Stars as the games industry’s equivalent of the Brits, perhaps forgetting momentarily that the Brits are a widely-derided cokefest of music-biz major-label backslapping, more concerned with flogging a few more Annie Lennox albums than acclaiming great artistic endeavours.

It’s a bit like trying to increase your street credibility with The Kids by announcing that you’re a big fan of the Rolling Stones. (Though the organisers do deserve credit for living up to their gameplan – Terry Alderton and Sarah Cawood as presenters did an excellent job of recalling the legendary Sam Fox-Mick Fleetwood pairing at the Brits, though Fleetwood was probably funnier. And the one true moment of entertainment in the whole proceedings came from Cawood’s horrified “Snogging-nerds-wasn’t-in-the-contract!” reaction to the gaming competition finalist kissing her on the lips.)

The question nagging at the back of The Man On The Street’s mind is, who is Game Stars actually FOR? Not the games-playing public, since there didn’t seem to be a single member of the public present at the show. Not the game creators, since as we’ve already seen, the show went out of its way to ensure they never showed their nerdy, beardy faces on the screen. Not the nation’s TV viewers, because the vast majority of them don’t play games and couldn’t give a rat’s arse if Halo is judged to be better than Super Monkey Ball or not. As far as this reporter could gather, the whole event was staged for the sole benefit of PR companies, who got some lovely free peak-viewing airtime for their nice EPKs and some appearance money for their more desperate celebrity clients. And The Man On The Street is pretty damn certain he’s never heard anyone say “You know, the things we could REALLY do with some more of in this industry are PR bollocks and TV appearances from hideous fuckwits from Big Brother.”

Getting clueless nobodies – or even A-list stars, come to that - to show up at games awards is a self-defeating exercise, because in demonstrating their obvious complete absence of any knowledge of gaming whatsoever, as most of them do, all you achieve is to show how NON-mainstream gaming still is, and how the glamorous and attractive would never be caught dead doing it. Videogaming is terminally uncool, and having Terry Pratchett get the name of the new Zelda game wrong in front of the nation – because anyone can see that for all he knows he’d call it “The Wino Wanker” if that’s what it said on the autocue - is not the way to change that.