Jeremy Clarkson pens a delicious riff on the pros and cons of the Internet:

Which is why I have been examining the argument carefully and I've decided that the biggest issue in all of this is the internet. It's a monster. An invisible machine over which mankind has absolutely no control. We can't even turn it off.

Let us start by listing the good things it has achieved. Well, er, it is now possible to find out where James Garner was born without going to the library and order your Sunday lunch without going to the shops. And there are some jolly funny things on YouTube.

But now let's look at some of the bad things. Well, your children are being bullied mercilessly on Facebook and there is no one you can contact to have the bullying stopped, your husband is spending most of his evenings baring his private parts to some Ukrainian girl, your wife has rekindled a childhood romance, the twin towers have been knocked down, Stephen Fry has been driven to the edge of another breakdown, you have to spend half your day answering pointless emails, there is unimaginable cruelty in almost every blog, where the rules of defamation seem not to apply, and James Garner was not born, as suggested on one site, in Chicago.

It gets worse. Only a few weeks ago my colleague James May scuttled off into a Romanian wood to have a pee, the event was captured on a phone and now it's on the internet. And there is absolutely nothing he can do to have it taken off. These are just the minor issues, the annoyances. The big problem is just round the corner: the bankrupting of everyone in the world of film, art, literature, news and music.

Read it all.

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