There are several ways to watch Citizen Khan.

One is to watch as a snob, shaking your head at the feeble attempts at comedy. Another is to take it in bite-size chunks, watching a few minutes here and there, stopping to make tea, to read a chapter of a good book, or to refresh yourself with a YouTube clip of some decent comedy, returning to cringe and endure. Another, being the most drastic but, I suppose, the most effective, is to travel back in time to a 1950s asylum in New England and book yourself in for a particularly brutal lobotomy. I know healthcare in the US is expensive, but it'd be worth going the whole hog with this option. Request the works! Only then, rendered numb and infantile, will Citizen Khan be palatable to you: it won't irritate anymore, it won't aggravate and it won't infuriate. It'll just be some jumbled coloured images on the screen.

It should certainly be approached like a medical concern: you've picked up a dose of Citizen Khan, so keep warm, drink plenty of fluids and then take one episode of good comedy per day. I recommend Monday night's return of Toast of London. Do not operate machinery unless the machinery in question is the TV and Citizen Khan is on it. In which case, operate it like crazy!

Believe me, there was no other way to write this review. I had to go for the light-hearted approach because if I wrote seriously about how much I loathed this programme I'd just seem poisonous and hate-filled.

I'm rarely impressed by BBC1 Friday night comedies. Looking back through my archive of reviews here, I gave grim assessments of the recent Boomers and Big School, and now here comes Citizen Khan to fill the flabby slot they both occupied and it is by far the worst.

I know the jokes at the beginning of the episode really well as I kept attempting to watch this and then simply finding it unbearable and having to stop and come back to it later. So I'm horribly familiar with the forced hilarity of the daughter at the airport having loads of bags for her dad to pick up. 'That one…and that one…and that one….' and so on.

Then they think they've left their old gran on the plane, which is shortly departing for Mogadishu, but - oh the comedy! - she was only in the toilet. Do you see? They thought she was on the plane! But she wasn't! She was in the toilet!

Meanwhile the dad is being hurtled around the airport on a baggage truck and going 'oohhhhh!'

Something mildly funny happened when Mr Khan was concealed inside a tea trolley, spying on his mother in law. His call to prayer app was triggered, giving away his hiding place, so he pretends he's in a mobile prayer trolley, and politely asks the women to point him towards Mecca.

As for the rest of it, how can it be offered to us as comedy? It would feel insulting if the material had enough heart to provoke an emotion.

That's why I was puzzled to learn some Muslims were offended by the last series of Citizen Khan. I read some online reviews to check if my negative reaction to the show was unusual and saw that the BBC had received hundreds of complaints about the series. How can such a weak programme possibly cause offence? It's like getting offended by candy floss or frozen peas.

But if people will insist on getting annoyed then it shouldn't just be Muslims who're complaining about Citizen Khan, but every single BBC licence fee payer.