There's an art to dishing out star ratings in reviews – as a TV critic, this is how I do it

I was very happy to give the latest episode of ‘This Time with Alan Partridge’ five solid stars, for example, but the ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ Christmas special last year wasn’t so lucky

One of the great joys of being a telly critic is that you get to play God. Or at least you can delude yourself that you do, as if the writers, producers, directors, channel execs and actors are sitting terrified, waiting to see your verdict on their creations. Thanks to the star system, they don’t really need to read the whole thing. Months, perhaps, years of graft is reduced to a rating out of five stars or blobs. Or so some of us might imagine.

Obviously, I give them a great deal of thought. I like to think of them as divisions of 20 per cent, as in an A-level exam, or the alpha, beta etc marks you might get for a finals paper. Thus, the five-star ratings are bands that contain some variation. For example I was very happy to give the latest Steve Coogan vehicle This Time with Alan Partridge five solid stars for each of the six episodes – 30/30 in all. That covered episode four, featuring a musical sequence of Alan administering CPR to a primly dressed silicon sex doll – a moment of comedic perfection. But it also covered the last episode in the run which contained a fairly gratuitous homoerotic scene in a shower (though still better than almost anything else on TV at the moment, homoerotic or otherwise).

By contrast, I really wanted to give the Mrs Brown’s Boys 2018 Christmas special a zero-star rating, but apparently this is technically impossible under the star-rating system, so Brendan O’Carroll’s crime against humanity still got a one-star rating. This looked much too generous, and I immodestly quote myself here: “Recall, if you will, the scene in A Clockwork Orange where the violent droog played by Malcolm McDowell undergoes forcible cinematic aversion therapy. His eyelids are clamped open while he is forced to watch unspeakable acts of horror, his ordeal part of some deranged official experiment. Same here, when I get a commission to review the Christmas edition of Mrs Brown’s Boys.”