For nearly 18 months now, the increasingly frustrated European liberal fat-cat elite has been asking for some clues as to what we brave British Brexiters imagine Brexit will be, the pastry edifice of Theresa May’s monumental “Brexit means Brexit” statement having already crumbled last year, when a moth’s tear fell near it.

Unable to say what Brexit is, a strategically and heroically vague David Davis last week chose instead to tell Brussels what Brexit isn’t, promising, definitively, that Brexit will not be “a Mad Max-style world”, despite evidence to the contrary commissioned by his own department.

Andrea Leadsom, meanwhile, has clarified that Brexit will also not be “some ham”, Jacob Rees-Mogg has stated categorically that Brexit will not be “a drawing of Alain Delon”, while Dan Hananananan has further elucidated that Brexit will also not be “a kind of thing with all stuff on it, and brown stripes, going up and down, like humbug mints on an escalator or some hot bees”.

Imagine if he had been just a little more pop-culturally literate in the way that Tories just never are

In the light of Davis’s assurances that we will not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction”, I wonder how much worse the post-Brexit dystopia could be anyway? Would the air of the capital remain technically toxic? Would there be nuclear power stations abandoned in dangerous disrepair? Would the oceans choke on plastic? Would secure housing be a pipe dream for millions? Would Boris Johnson still be free to scatter his lies at midnight into sleeping children’s eyes?

For many of the disenfranchised and disenchanted Britons who voted for Brexit, being plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia would represent an improvement in their living conditions! Perhaps being plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia is one of the few tangible benefits of Brexit!! Especially if it was sunny and featured Tina Turner as an Amazon cyberpunk!!! And anyway, better to live one day free in a Mad Max-style dystopia than a thousand years as a slave in the world’s largest single market area.

I worry that the idea that we will be “plunged” into a Mad Max-style dystopia is a little optimistic. The word “plunged” suggests events would unfold with a speed and decisiveness so far absent from the Brexit process. After a few years of sliding slowly and painfully into a Mad Max-style dystopia, with no clear end to the plunging in sight, Leave voters will look back at the suggestion that we were to be plunged into anything at all as just another example of the lying betrayals of their feckless and apparently unaccountable Brexit cheerleaders. Where was the plunge into a Mad Max-style dystopia we were promised?

But what do I know? I have not even seen any of the Mad Max movies, though last year Brendan McCarthy, co-writer of the recent reboot Mad Max: Fury Road, described me as “an archaic leftwing relic”, adding: “Milo Yiannopoulos is more on the zeitgeist.” But where is the discredited alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos now? Nowhere. And where am I? I am in a three-star hotel room in Stratford-upon-Avon, eating a bag of humbug mints, which are what gave me the idea for the closing sentence of the third paragraph. I win.

And anyway, the best dystopian sci-fi film is not Mad Max, but the straight-to-video Mad Max rip-off World Gone Wild (Lee H Katzin, 1987), which I bought on VHS from a shop called Rimpy’s Fags, Foods and Non-Foods on Horn Lane in Acton for 50p in 1989. (World Gone Wild was, of course, filed in the non-foods section of the store, along with the wood, a fossilised coelacanth and Terence Trent D’Arby.)

The reason World Gone Wild is a better dystopian sci-fi movie than Brendan McCarthy’s stupid Mad Max: Fury Road, for example, is because it doesn’t have a colon in the middle of its title like what a idiot would do; and because it stars Adam Ant as a man called Derek Abernathy who, in a plot copied off Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, harries a plucky village of survivors in a Mad Max-style dystopia; and because it co-stars the bewildering actor Alan Autry, who played a gay footballer in the controversial gay Cheers episode The Boys in the Bar, but went on to become the anti-gay mayor of Fresno California; and because I’ve seen it and you never will. I win. Again.

David Davis rightly became the immediate target of the high-speed satire sausage machines of social media’s infinite monkey treadmill for his foolish Mad Max metaphor, but imagine if he had been just a little more pop-culturally literate in the way that Tories just never are.

Imagine if, instead of saying Britain would not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction”, David Davis had said Britain would not be “plunged into a Derek Abernathy-style world. You know? Derek Abernathy? The Adam Ant character in World Gone Wild? Haven’t you seen it? Steve Jones from the Sex Pistol’s forgotten 80s hair metal band Chequered Past do the theme tune.”

The confused corrupt Eurocrat fat-cats of Brussels would immediately have sent their researchers off to score copies of World Gone Wild to decode Davis’s latest opaque clue as to what Britain imagined Brexit was, thus buying Davis more time to invoke ever more obscure dystopian sci-fi movies in his quest to hide the dispiriting truth.

“I tell you what Brexit won’t be. It won’t be like that one set two years from now where Christian Bale and a group of bedraggled survivors hide in a desolate English wasteland attacked by giant dragons. Rain of Fire, wasn’t it? No, Reign of Fire.

“Well, whatever, it won’t be like that. Or Enzo Castellari’s The New Barbarians, where the American footballer Fred Williamson is a kind of Jedi-ninja in a desert ruled by lawless bikers. Brexit won’t be like that. Or a drawing of Alain Delon.”

Content Provider continues to tour until April, when it resolves with three dates at the Royal Festival Hall. stewartlee.co.uk