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Opening line on Channel 5’s ­latest hatchet job on the ­unemployed : “Benefits. Britain is obsessed.”

An inopportune moment, then, to have taken a slurp of coffee, which went a-spluttering.

This from the channel that brought us The Big Benefits Row Live , The Great Big Benefits Wedding Live, My Big Benefits Family, Celebs on Benefits: Fame to Claim, Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole, Benefits: The Millionaire Shoplifter and Benefits: Can’t Work, Won’t Work.

To name but a few. Yes, C5. Clearly WE’RE the ones obsessed.

And now, on top of this crud pile, they proudly present The Great British Benefits Handout – three jobless families given £26,000, the maximum annual allowance, to sign off and try to change their lives.

Mostly, so far, by blowing £460 on a raccoon and £350 on a PlayStation 4.

Read more:Why waiting for Universal Credit is so terrifying

It’s a “UK first experiment”, successful abroad, so they’ve hired three experts to oversee it, including a psychologist and a professor.

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Without whom we might just see through the smokescreen to the producers’ real, bear-baiting intention – ridicule and ­generating vitriol.

Otherwise they wouldn’t have let them loose without a single word of business or financial advice.

But unlike some of C5’s targets, these are no scroungers.

There’s single mum Rachel who had to quit college when she got pregnant.

Married dad-of-four Scott, forced to give up his electrician’s job to care for a son with learning difficulties .

And ­aspirational Tony, the ghost of Hi-de-Hi’s Ted Bovis, who’s the breakout star and thrilled he can now afford Lynx deodorant and Dove for ­fiancée Diane (“she smells lovely this morning”).

They plan to open a second-hand shop: “We haven’t gone into this blindfolded.

“We watch Bargain Hunt and Things To Sell in the Attic, we’ve been watching for ten years.”

(Image: Dragonfly)

Yes, Things To Sell in the Attic. One of my favourites.

Scott, meanwhile, dived headfirst into his kids’ party business idea by buying that raccoon.

He’s not stopping there: “I could do with some giant millipedes, giant snails, Madagascan cockroaches, 12ft snakes, 6ft lizards, a nice iguana, maybe a skunk or a coati…”

Wife Leanne: “I just don’t see how ­anyone is going to go, ‘I know, let’s invite a raccoon to my birthday party’.”

Scott: “Well, you invite Peppa Pig.”

Man’s got a point. Mind you, there’s no way of dissuading someone who sees ­nothing wrong with having, as his party’s centrepiece, a Titanic-themed giant ­inflatable slide.

Good luck with that.

I assume we’ll see more of Rachel this week. But for now we’re left with her ­eight-year-old daughter Annie’s reaction on seeing the £26,000 cash: “Ooh! Can we buy a giraffe?!”

Don’t, Annie. You’ll give Scott ideas.