AS someone in their forties who doesn’t have any pension arrangements, I usually dispel thoughts of growing old to the file in my brain marked “head in the sand”. Last week, however, I received rare comfort on this issue from the most unlikely of sources: the House of Lords. I’ve worked out the ideal way to a lucrative retirement, you see – get yourself appointed as a peer.

If Meet the Lords, the BBC’s new fly-on-the-wall documentary - the second part of which airs tonight - is anything to go by, that’s clearly what many who sit in the place have already done. Indeed, Lord Tyler, who used to be a Lib Dem MP, joked to camera “It’s the best daycare centre for the elderly in London.”

This is no joke, however. As the programme highlighted, not only does each peer get £300 a day in expenses merely for turning up, they also get heaps of free deference from the staff of ridiculously attired lackeys. “Good morning, my Lord,” bowed the top-hatted, frock-coated doorman to the doddery old duffers making their way in for the day’s business at two in the afternoon. “It’s morning here until prayers are read, you see,” he was sure to explain for those of us who aren’t down with daft traditions like these.

I can’t imagine what the Lords’ public relations folk were thinking when they let the programme makers in. Did they honestly believe taxpayers, the mugs who pay for this nonsense, would enjoy having our noses rubbed in this freeloading? Though I admit it was enjoyable inasmuch as I spent much of the show laughing at the sheer gall of these jokers.

You honestly couldn’t make it up. First there was Lord Palmer, the Scots aristocrat and one of 90 hereditary peers that remain following the cull of 1999, still lording it over legislation that affects the rest of us. As Lord Palmer admitted, in the sort of accent I presumed had died with the Queen Mother, he’s never been the sharpest tool in the box. And as he spent much of his time on camera berating the authorities for getting rid of a TV room where he and his cronies used to sit and drink whisky and watch the cricket, you could see what he meant.

Stupidity is obviously catching. Elsewhere there was Lord Borwick, the wealthy property developer and Tory hereditary peer who didn’t even have the sense to stop crowing about the fact that as a whip he’d played a key role in relaxing the planning laws. Former speaker Baroness D’Souza, meanwhile, didn’t do the place any favours by cheerily telling an anecdote about a unnamed colleague leaving a taxi meter running while he popped in and out within five minutes to make sure he got his £300.

Lest we forget there are around 750 of these parasites in this unelected cesspit of pomp, privilege and patronage, 204 of whom represent a Tory Government intent on demonising benefits “scroungers”. That’s why I found myself laughing, of course. If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry - or head down to Westminster with a big box of rotten eggs.

Let’s be clear, the House of Lords is not only a democratic abomination, it’s a societal one, too, the most obvious and sickening reminder of what a hideously divided country Britain remains.

The irony is, of course, that this programme was shown in the very week that the Lords defeated the Government’s Brexit Bill, highlighting the considerable power still retained by the place. Sadly, few seem to give a stuff about this democratic deficit at the heart of Westminster. A further irony is that many of those who voted for Brexit spent much of their time banging on about “getting their country back” from unelected bodies in Brussels.

And with such little appetite for reform, it looks like the Lords will be having the last laugh for many years to come. Sadly, there will probably be space for me and my zimmer yet.