When the director-general of the BBC claimed on expenses the 23p it cost him to park on Bruce Forsyth’s chin for his 80th birthday (or something), you may have wondered, as I did, not what the hell he thought he was doing with licence payers’ money, but how on earth he managed to park anything anywhere for 23p?

The minimum spend at the cheapest car park I can think of is 70p an hour (“or part thereof”). If you’ve got only a pound and, not unreasonably, would like 30p back, the machine will merely sit there and refer you to the sign that says it is unable to give change. And then, if you leave the car park for a moment to try to get the right change from the shop 20 yards away, a git in a hat will come along and fine you £60.

Car parking is stupidly expensive. Simon Evans, a stand-up comedian friend of mine, once observed that, at £6 an hour, the parking meters outside a central London McDonald’s were paid more than the people working inside. How demoralising is that? To stand behind the counter pushing fries and gherkins at fat people, all the time knowing that the box on a stick outside is earning more than you are.

All of this is because most car parks are owned by the local council. This means they are run under the usual council policy of taking an extortionate amount of money from you and giving you little in return. Where I live (Canterbury, since you ask), after 7pm, even if you want to park for only five minutes, it costs £1.50. A few months ago it was 50p. Then it was £1, and now, without warning, it has gone up again. That’s a 200% increase over a few months. Why? For that money I want a bit more than just a boring old parking space, thank you. I want some kind of entertainment. A motorcycle display team, perhaps, or a dancing traffic warden, preferably with his trousers on fire.

Like you, I wonder where the money goes. Certainly not into the upkeep of the car park as far as I can tell, otherwise the light above the machine would work and the git’s hat would fit properly. As far as I can make out, your money is spent on more signs telling you that you now have to pay more money in order to pay for more signs, while anything left over will be used to develop cruel and unusual punishments for anyone arriving back at the car two minutes late. As you read this, the chances are your local council is building a camp not unlike Guantanamo Bay on an out-of-town industrial estate next to Staples and Homebase to be used for the indefinite detention and beating of anyone not displaying a valid ticket.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that so much effort and technology are expended on catching and fining drivers for the most trivial of offences. It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that they are a soft target in terms of extracting money, would it? Once you have taken down or photographed a driver’s registration number you know where they live and that means you can menace them with threats to take away their house and starve their family. By contrast, if you take CCTV pictures of hoodies engaged in acts of vandalism, they aren’t recognisable and even if they were, they don’t have money to pay fines.

So the daylight robbery committed against drivers every time they want to park will continue and probably get worse as local councils look for ways to raise more cash. I am going to write to the DG of the BBC, not to chastise him for his expenses, but to ask him the whereabouts of the machine that costs only 23p. And when I find out, I won’t be telling anyone else.

- Jon Holmes will be performing his stand-up show Rock Star Babylon at the Edinburgh Festival from August 17-30. Details at www.jonholmes.net