Today’s first stage of Le Shew Beeg on Corsica proved once again that comedy is incapable of matching reality pedal stroke for pedal stroke, and indeed may have fallen off in a roundabout somewhere and been run over by a publicity-caravan vehicle, strafed by a French jet or run through by Napoleon’s ghost.

If the poor sod who stuffed the Orica-GreenEdge bus under the finish-line scaffolding didn’t instantly get the ax, he will spend the remainder of the 2013 Tour enduring bus-stop jokes.

“Dude, you shouldn’t be driving the tall bus, you should be riding on the short bus!” That sort of thing.

This is horribly unkind to people who really do suffer from cognitive impairment, like the feckin’ eejits who decided to move the finish line out 3km only to move it back again in less time than it took The Gorilla to decide he’d had enough of that bullshit, rip off his own derailleur and eat it.

Jesus wept. The guys in charge of Ken Kesey’s bus had it more together than this lot, and they were all on acid.