The ability to laugh at yourself is a valuable quality; it shows you have a sense of perspective about your place in the world. In an age when The X Factor has encouraged self-delusion to hit epic scales, any evidence that egotism hasn't run entirely rampant is to be welcomed. So the BBC sending itself up - or its foreign news teams, at least - had to be a good thing.

So how did Taking The Flak, set in a fictional African land in uproar, flip the coin and end up as an orgy of patronising self-congratulation rather than a healthy mickey-take? Because Jennie Bond playing the good sport put it on the same smug level as all those Comic Relief spoofs you can't slag off because they're for charidee. As media satires go, Taking The Flak was Taking The P***.