Tucked away in a niche of the TV Guide of Monday's Canberra Times it was reported (with the columnist appropriately disgusted) that "Channel Nine's Married At First Sight is now the leading free-to-air television show in Australia".

What's more, the writer despaired, the runaway success of this debauched, fake "quest for love" entertainment is spawning more shows as sordid and idiotic as itself. "That's why we'll be having three successive variations of The Bachelor on Ten filling the rest of the year's schedule."

Yes, the nation is becoming dumber by the day. While global warming menaces the whole globe, the spectre of national dumbing is already here, hurting our nation. Our intellectually low-lying country is fast becoming inundated by the rising waters of idiocy.

At the last federal election those of us with refined minds noticed how all campaigning, everything said by leaders (so many three-word slogans!) was tailored, artfully, to appeal to and to make no intellectual demands of The Bachelor-watching classes. Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten were on my TV set in my living room but were talking to someone (a Bachelor and Bachelorette-watcher with the politics and current affairs attention span of a golden retriever), who doesn't live at my place.

I went to ask my GP if he would prescribe me something that would enable me to sleep through the next election and if, meanwhile, he can prescribe something to enable me to sleep through the Commonwealth Games.

For as usual our parochial media's gloating over Australia's Commonwealth Games medal tally, over our medals-trouncing of tiny, struggling dominions where the goats outnumber the people, has me grumbling like a grumbletonian.

I asked my GP Dr Sawbones (not his real name) for something to enable me to feign death, the way Juliet does in Shakespeare's great romantic tragedy, during the Games. But he insisted that medical science has yet to come up with such a potion. Young, he had never read or seen Shakespeare's play ("Further proof of national dumbing," I muttered to myself, marvelling that a modern Australian education can be Shakespearless) and didn't know what Juliet might have taken.

So there can be no medical escape from the irritating, worrying Games. And perhaps some of our 2018 Games angst is because our cricketers' ball-tampering disgrace has left us jumpy about our sports heroes.

What if our Games athletes have some similar shames in store for us?

What if there is sand-tampering at the beach volleyball, ball-tampering in the table-tennis, bowl-tampering in the lawn bowls, shuttlecock-tinkering in the badminton? Our tense nation waits, gnawing its knuckles, praying that these will not prove to be for us the Games of Shame. How we pray that no athlete, tempted to bend the rules, will ask him or herself "What would Julie do?" thinking of our foreign minister's moral example with her nimble use of her entitlements to have her boyfriend travel with her at public expense.

Meanwhile, Australian bragging about Australia's medal haul seems obscene.

Australia and England lead the tally, only because we are both big, fat, rich countries and can afford to cultivate elite athletes in swish sports institutes. Meanwhile at the bottom of the tally, tiny nations like the Squid Islands languish with just one pluckily-won bronze.

When I come to power, at the Commonwealth and Olympic Games the medal tallies will be adjusted to take into account nations' relative might, population sizes, GNP and GDP, and all appropriate social and economic factors. I will appoint a small but dedicated team of brilliant, humane, justice-conscious and of course socialism-tinged economists, social demographers and ethicists to devise just such a medal-tally-adjusting formulae.

Meanwhile I have put together my own back-of-an-envelope formulae. Applied to this morning's Commonwealth Games medal tally (I am handcrafting this column on a Wednesday) this adjustment, imparting truth, fairness and justice and proper rewards for true pluck and grit has radically rearranged the 71-nation medal tally league table. It has tiny, plucky, Mauritius (population 1.2 million) coming second with its one silver medal. Breathing down its neck in third place is teeny, battling, potato-growing Malta (population 436,000, so about the size of Canberra's) by virtue of its one bronze medal.

In this my ethically-adjusted table, smug Australia and England are coming just 22nd and 35th respectively. They are well behind valiant Vanuatu (one bronze) and courageous Cameroon (one bronze).

Perhaps, because of my Scottish blood, I should disqualify myself from any rearrangement of my dear Scotland's ranking. But I cannot help myself.

As I write, dear Scotland is eighth in the official table with 28 medals. But, as I take all important things into account, including and especially the Scots' principled vote against Brexit, my Scotland is coming FIRST in my adjusted medal tally.

Yes, being half-Scottish, I have a conflict of interest. But when I asked myself "What would Julie do in this situation?" my conscience was magically anaesthetised and I felt able to press ahead with my pro-Scottish stats-tampering.