NERIT superhero Flash Gordonelatos wrestles for control of the EU potato gun with the Emperor Wolfie Mingle

Today’s news that Greek industrial output fell 2.1% year-on-year in July – that makes five contractions on the trot – wasn’t a shock to anyone who knows Greece or speaks regularly to Greeks; but both the austerity tendency and Antonis Samaras are running out of explanations that even their most loyal bourgeois braindead fans in Kalamata can compute. I did watch one quick clip which had a minor official saying the tide was turning because it was less than half of the previous month’s decline: but then the Greek stats agency Elstat had just revised the June decline upwards, so it sort of dented his sabre a little. Even without that, this surreal King-is-in-the-altogether tableau could, if the mainstream media had a sense of humour (or even a scintilla of interest) turn out some amazing headlines.

‘Minister says Greek economic reversal now in 4th not 5th gear’ springs to mind. Still, we British turned the 1940 Dunkirk humiliation into a heroic rescue, so anything is possible. Except of course that we had some boats, whereas the Greek élite has sold all theirs.

But there remains one thing seemingly rather more vital in Greece than it is in Cruel Britannia: the judiciary. For also today, the First Instance Court in Athens ordered the rehiring of former State broadcaster ERT personnel. That adds up to some 2,000 people back in a job. Specifically, the Court commanded the Greek government, as successor of ERT, “to accept the services of the ex ERT-personnel, place them in positions they held before the closure, and pay them the same salaries.”

That’s going to give the new mouth-organ NERIT something of an overcrowding problem. We may be about to witness news anchor committees issuing bulletins confirming that Evangelos Venizelos is a corrupt slob engaged in a heroic battle with greed, and Gikas Hardouvelis is an armchair grey pillock whose colourful standup routines dazzle Brussels while boring the folks in the Kafenion.

But it is going to make things sensationally weird for journalist and anchorman Nikos Evaggelatos. For NERIT announced today (no doubt before hearing the Court vedict) that it’s hiring him for a new show….and if Nikos’ track record is anything to go by, he’s going to be off that scale of unbelievability they had to extend just to accommodate NERIT in the first place.

In 1998, Evaggelatos was the anchorman for SKAI TV’s news, and in one fatal bulletin decided to turn amateur psych negotiator by talking live on TV with Sorin Matei, a Romanian fugitive who was holding a hostage. The news hound’s largely absent skills got the hostage killed. In 2001, Evaggelatos was the News Director of Tempo TV, and fronted a piece he called “In the camps of the Taliban”. Not only had he never been in the camps, Tempo staff had been refused visas into Afghanistan.

In turn, the bloke has been suspended from the Athens Journalists’ Union three times: for wrongly associating someone as a November 17 terrorist, for using an actor in a fake interview, and for accepting the lead role in a commercial (a practice quite rightly prohibited by journalists’ unions in Greece).

Watch out for some edgy stuff from the fertile imagination of Nikos Evaggelatos. First Greek Supertanker in Space. Rupert Murdoch pregnant with Prince Philip’s Lovechild. Hellenic galleons sighted off coast of Japan. It couldn’t get any sillier, but it might get funnier.

Special thanks are due to Eleni, kostaskallergis, and Ekathemerini for informing this post.