Amsterdam - the infamous Dutch city of sin where cheap fags are two a penny and hot girl-on-girl-on-dog live action shows attract millions of sex tourists from the United States, is to install new lights along its 200 miles of canals after local prostitutes complained they were putting off potential clients.

"Ve hed some remarks from the prostitutes dat dere voz too much light, both for dem und the clients," dapper spokestypeperson Dirk Van Horn told Utterpants. "Ve are investigating the possibility of lowering the light levels in the city centre."

Amsterdam's 29,000 prostitutes—never backward in coming forward when their business is threatened, complained to city officials that the lights installed last week did not give them enough privacy and prevented them from getting their hands on their punter's wallets while their backs were turned.

The city, which tolerates non-sex tourists, provided they keep to a few, select coffee shops near the central station, said it will test a new control system to dim the lights next week, Van Horn told us. If the test gets the thumbs-up—or possibly the bums up—from the city's sex workers, the system may be rolled out across the entire country in a bid to boost the pocket-handkerchief sized country's ailing economy.

Even in a state which has a long and proud tradition of lonely old men molesting sheep, Ron Gittes, who asked to remain anonymous, but who lives at 427 Ewe Avenue (254-772-4470), stands out as a pervert of colossal proportions. "I started when I was a teenager," sobbed the remorseful father-of-five. "Like a lot of Texans, I just couldn't get laid by the local cheerleaders on account of the chastity pledges they'd taken so I started making out with sheep and things just kinda got out of hand until I was screwing pretty much anything on four legs and sometimes two."
"Two?" we asked?
"Ostriches."

"So what made you take this drastic step?"
"I found this'm Baptist Church on that Internet thang where it said that if'n you want to git right with the Lord y'all gotta accept the Lamb of God as your saviour. Then it hit me. Jaysus H Christ! I'd been messin' with the Lord Himself! So I figured the only way to wash out my sins was to cut my balls off.
"Won't that make you less of a man?" we asked.
"Well—the way I figure it, tha President 'ain't got no balls neither and he's done OK, 'ain't he?"

The twenty-four-year old man who entered the Big Brother house two weeks ago under the name of Armando has been evicted after it was revealed that he was in fact Thomas Smith, a frustrated sociology graduate intent on unveiling the semiological absurdity of the programme. Speaking exclusively to Utterpants after his sudden eviction yesterday, Smith said: “I am totally gutted that my plan didn't come off—I was trying to keep a low profile so I could get through to the final week, then I was going to bring the whole venture to its knees by reading out a salient passage from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.”

The show’s producers were reluctant to comment on how Smith managed to get through the many stages of auditions and beat thousands of earnest hopefuls to a coveted place in the house. There has been speculation among those close to the show that the Big Brother complex may now be fitted with special equipment that will be able to detect periods of independent thought lasting more than three seconds, which will be linked to an alarm system that will alert Dermot O’Leary and Davina McCall.

But an eminent sociologist we consulted dismissed the idea as being 'about as likely as detecting an original programming idea in the mind of a Channel Four executive' and requested that our researcher stop calling him for quotes.

The House of Commons has long voiced its concern over the success of reality television, which has essentially stolen the format of its flagship programme ‘Prime Minister’s Question Time’.

Tony Blair, generously taking time off from shredding top secret government memos on the preparation for the invasion of Iraq, told a spellbound audience on 'Breakfast with Frost' that: “we have long employed the formula of ‘people arguing in a room’, but what reality television has taught us is that if you want to win the ratings war, you can’t just rely on that.'

Expanding on the need for politics to keep pace with the nation’s fascination with reality, Mr Blair's eyes lit up as he outlined his vision for parliamentary broadcasting. “I think it is all too clear in today’s society that people’s attention spans will simply not stretch to a full term, or indeed, a single parliamentary session. They don’t want to wait four or five years to vote for an eviction from the House of Commons—they want to see people being removed from office every week.” In this new ‘reality’ set-up, people will be able to text in their votes to Channel Four and decide the fate of a different member of parliament every week.

The excitement will peak on Friday nights with an ‘Eviction Night Special’ broadcast live from Westminster. The show will feature the week’s evicted politician being cheered or booed by crowds as they leave the Commons, and later being interviewed live on air by Kelly Brooke, dressed in what producers have called 'fun-sized leisurewear'—or a boob tube and arse-grazing pelmet to the rest of us.