TELEWEST, Los Angeles, Friday (NNN) — Virgin Media (“Let me tell you what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about. It’s all about a girl who digs a guy with a big Dick. The entire song. It’s a metaphor for big Dicks.”) has hired Jules Winnfield of the Marcellus Wallace Organization to promote its super-fast 50Mb broadband service.

In the advertisement, Jules Winnfield and Sir Richard Branson go to Virgin Media customer service to recover a briefcase belonging to their boss. After screaming “Technical, melonfarmer! Do you speak it?” they kill every internet site accessible from the service except Wikipedia. While driving the download back to Mr Wallace, they accidentally shoot Wikipedia in the face. Now they’re picking bits of their servers out of the upholstery. “When you came pulling in here,” says Quentin Tarantino, “did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said Dead NTL Storage?”

The ad ends with a stirring speech from Winnfield:

The path of the righteous browser is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is the IWF who in the name of the RIAA and goodwill shepherds the marks through the valley of darkness, for they are truly their brother’s keepers and the finders of lost downloads. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know My name is the Lord when I pop a download cap in their—

At this point the screen goes blue and the set-top box locks up.

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Sir, We are a group of UK film and TV producers, directors and writers. We are concerned that the successes of the creative industries in the UK are being undermined by the illegal online file-sharing of film and TV.

We are asking the Government to show its support by ensuring that internet service providers play their part in tackling this huge problem by giving us money. Lots of money. Just keep piling it in, we’ll tell you when it’s enough.

In 2007, up to (well, it could be) 25 per cent of all online TV piracy took place in the UK. Popular shows are downloaded illegally hundreds of thousands of times per episode, and some of them might even be ours rather than something American made with an actual budget.

It is true that in 2008, UK commercial TV broadcasters enjoyed the highest viewing figures in five years, that total TV viewing was up 10% year-on-year, and the valuable yet hard-to-reach 16 to 24-year-old demographic (the typical file-sharer) watched 4.9% more commercial TV and saw 12% more ads. But it’s the principle of the thing: someone is getting money from something that touches something one of us once touched, therefore the money belongs to us. This is the style of corporate thinking, after all, that brought Britain its great economic gains from 1997 to 2007. At a time when so many jobs are being lost in the wider economy, it is especially important that our gravy train be maintained.

Internet service providers have the ability to change the behaviour of those customers who illegally distribute content online. They have the power to make significant change and to prevent their infrastructure from being used on a wholesale scale for illegal activity. They have the power to stop people looking at the cover of Virgin Killer. They have a secret magic wand that will fix everything wrong with the media industry’s income streams and they are refusing, with malice aforethought, to use it. If they are not prepared to give us all the free money we ask for and a bit more besides, they should be compelled to do so.

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WIKIALITY, Little Boring, Tuesday (NNN) — The Internet Watch Foundation’s “Crapland” child-friendly Internet theme park has gone bust after only three days.

An information board at the entrance depicts the classical painting Smell The Glove by Scorpionaggio (courtesy National Portrait Gallery) and welcomes the visitor on a “flight of the imagination, travelling down the magical pathways that teenagers have used to get their porn for centuries,” and which have been specially opened up for the lucky children invited to come. “Just like Michael Jackson’s Neverland.”

Advertisements promised a “Clean Kiddie-Friendly World … Hollywood Special FXs, Blind Faith plane ride, Nevermind swimming baths, Houses of the Holy rock climbing … & much more!”

The reality when it opened on Saturday evening was somewhat less impressive. Spurious 404s, lying customer service staff (“for the authentic Internet experience!”), HTML 2.0 and web searches through AltaVista. “It looked like a website from 1995 or a paper chart of what it should look like,” said customer Jimmy Wales. “It was like they’d stacked dial-up modems on both sides of a path together, stuck some printouts on a TV and stuck a keyboard in front. We were waiting two hours and they charged us £10 for a photo with Mary Whitehouse.”

Two curtain-twitchers and a Whitehouse were attacked by irate Internet users. A posting on 4chan showed a busybody having a fag behind the grotto.

Then, on Tuesday evening, Crapland closed. A statement by the management said this was due to “intentional organised crowd manipulation and event sabotage and unscrupulous and inaccurate negative bias media that quoted our words accurately in full.” A woman dressed as a particularly hefty Pepperpot stood outside shrieking: “The IWF’s dead. Go home.”

Cable internet users who unwittingly signed up for the Crapland experience are giving up and getting DSL broadband instead. “It’s been a complete Virgin killer.”