“I, Scott Grønmark, do take my pet gerbil, Flufflebum, to be my lawful wedded wife…”

I must have been dozing when Same-Sex Marriage (aka Gay Marriage) morphed into Equal Marriage. Last year’s law allowing homosexuals to “marry” was called the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, but I see that the government website also refers to Equal Marriage. I noticed the “equal marriage” tag during a performance last week on Radio 4 by a (you’ll no doubt be astonished to hear) left-wing Scottish lesbian “comedienne”, Susan Calman, as it was the alluring title of the first episode of her sparkling new comedy series on BBC Radio Four Extra at 7.30pm on Thursdays.

These day, I normally switch off anything which is certain to annoy me, but this was such a perfect example of modern BBC radio comedy that I stayed my hand – at least until I’d finished the washing up. You could tell it was meant to be a comedy, because the audience kept shrieking with laughter (at least I think it was laughter). Perhaps Ms Calman was simultaneously performing some unrelated visual comedy, because what she was saying wouldn’t have elicited even the hint of a start of a smile from someone totally off their tits on nitrous oxide. Look, I've been listening to routines about how gay pseudo-comedians "came out" to their parents for decades now, and they really aren't getting any funnier. Now that gay marriage has been rendered legal, let me assure the LGBT stand-up comedy community that routines about same-sex "weddings" and civil partnerships are equally boring. Look, you won, okay? is there really any need to go on and on and on about it? It tends to come across as triumphalist liberal gloating.

I may very well have been going mad, but every time I switched on BBC Radio last week, there seemed to be somebody banging on about how fabulous it is to be gay or lesbian and how ridiculously anal (?) we heterosexuals are in comparison. I did begin to wonder if I was having some sort of Gilbert Pinfold-style paranoid episode brought on by all the weird herbal tablets I’m ingesting by the dozen at the moment (the huge, sinister Olive Leaf Extract capsules look like they should be sold for £20 a pop under the street name “Black Bombers”). In addition to that, my wife and son were visiting Paris, so I found myself on my own for four days, talking to the radio a lot – not a good sign, let’s face it. But then my nearest and dearest returned and we sat down last night to watch the first episode of the Peter Capaldi-era Dr Who, which featured the return of a rather attractive green humaoid lizard woman in Victorian London who was “married” to a less attractive human girl – they used the word “wife” when referring to each other (which invariably upsets my stomach), and at one stage indulged in a life-saving kiss on which the camera lingered salaciously.

Anyway, I know I didn’t imagine all this, as there was someone else there (an actual, real, genuine wife, as it happens) to confirm that I wasn’t hallucinating. Which led me to wonder whether the BBC isn’t using one of its most popular child-friendly programmes – one traditionally viewed en famille, whatever might constitute a famille in these enlightened times – to soften up the next generation for the introduction of a truly inclusive Equal Marriage Law, perhaps to be called the Marriage (Different Species Couples) Act.

I reckon another ten years of relentless propaganda from The Glim – the Great Liberal Indoctrination Machine that is the BBC – should do the trick.