“I got a weird email from somebody asking me whether I'd checked out Tragger Hippy on Belgian TV,” Joly wrote. “Thinking this was a joke, I hit the link. I spent the next 10 minutes in absolute shock.” He went on to say that the programme is “not merely a rip-off” of the ideas in Trigger Happy TV,” which he is used to, “but the sketches are identical – shot for shot, often in the same locations. It seems that a production company has gone about remaking my show…without asking for permission or licensing.”

Tim Van Aelst of production company Shelter, which made three series of Tragger Hippy for Flemish TV, responded that everything was done by the book. “Every year we paid format rights, and we never pretended the show wasn’t based on the British original – otherwise we might have chosen a different title.”

Joly’s show ran for only one season, Van Aelst pointed out, while his company’s version lasted for three, ruling out plagiarism.

So how could Joly have missed three years of payments from Flemish TV? Simple: by the time Tragger Hippy was first aired here, Dom Joly’s production company had gone bankrupt.

“Evidently, all of the income from his format went to Channel 4,” Van Aelst explained. “So there’s a good chance he never saw any of the format rights. That’s enough to make anyone upset.”