By now, the message about Skodas should have got through, even to comedy's most remote outposts, such as Blackpool and Johnny Vaughan's World Cup Extra. The Czech company that brought us those legendarily hilarious communist rattlers has miraculously reinvented itself, via the Fabia and Octavia, as a maker of sound, admirable and even quietly stylish vehicles with absolutely no ticklesome weaknesses whatsoever. What do you call a skip with four wheels? A very old joke about a Skoda that isn't funny any more because it no longer applies.
Possibly only Ozzy Osbourne's translation from bombed-out Brummy rocker to international figure of fun and presidential pal tops Skoda's achievement among the great and unlikely makeovers of our time. But success can turn a person's head, particularly if it follows a period of relentless public contempt. Could it be that Skoda, in this bright new springtime for the company, is beginning to get a little cocky?
I found myself wondering about this last week as I took delivery of the new Skoda Superb. Now, that's quite a name to give a car - a genuine arms-folded, chin-jutting hostage to fortune. It's automatically right up there with Citroen's Picasso, which is - needless to say - no Picasso.
As little as a decade ago, the mere occurrence of the words Skoda and superb in the same sentence would have been enough to cause tears of incontinent mirth to stream down people's faces. But even without the cultural baggage, it takes a particular kind of confidence to stamp the label Superb in aluminium block capitals four centimetres tall on the boot of a car.
Brazening this out, Skoda insist that the manufacture of luxury automobiles is actually the company's legacy - though you have to go back a few years. Yes, for the last half a century, under state control, it was restricted to producing motorised sweet tins. Before then, though, there was a golden era of limousine production which gave issue to the Skoda-Hispano-Suiza 25 of 1925, the Skoda 860 of 1929 - and indeed the Superb 640 of 1934.
Between then and 1949, Skoda used the Superb imprimatur to mark a host of thunderous prestige vehicles in a period when the big question the company laboured under was not how many dissidents you could pack in for a midnight trip to the border but how many members of a visiting royal family you could fit in the back for a tour.
So, Skoda is not just boasting with the Superb: it is reconnecting with the company's heritage. And boasting. Importantly, though, even if the description is a little generous, the car goes a long way towards living up to its own superlative.
It's packed, as no Skoda ever has been, with the sorts of bells and whistles that would cost at least an additional £5,000 in another make. It has air-conditioned glove compartments, electric seats, automated sunroof, a Tiptronic gear-shift option, a thumping CD system, motor-driven wing mirrors, some snazzy little hooks in the roof of the boot to hold your shopping bags upright - in short, a whole stack of anti-communist essentials.
Mine, in addition, had velvety suspension and was fitted with one of the pricier engines, a 2.8 V6 with an automatic transmission, which refused to speak in more than a whisper, even under hard acceleration.
These days, Skoda is an offshoot of VW and you may notice heavy hints of the Passat in both the controls and the long slope of the car's roofline.
Inside, my Superb wasn't so much veneered as wood-panelled, in the manner of libraries in Agatha Christie books. Meanwhile the seats and floors were clad in rich "ivory" leather and carpeting, as in an artist's impression of Barbara Windsor's bedroom.
But who is the car aimed at? The canny private buyer, clearly, with an eye for a good car sold cheap. But the Superb also has its eye on the fleet market. Skoda maintain that this is an "upper-medium-class" car. One takes this to mean that it's a cut above repmobiles such as the Ford Mondeo and the Vauxhall Vectra (both of which it whips into the corner for style), but a cut below the big Audis and Mercedes that the people in the truly expensive suits are driving - or rather, being driven in.
So where does that leave it? It's roomy enough in the back to collect the chairman from the airport. And once he's in there, he gets his own seat-warmer and some locally zoned controls for the air-conditioning. But would he agree to get in? Or would he send the driver away and tell him to come back with something German? How would the chairman feel, even in 2002, about being sent a courtesy Skoda?
The problem is that elitism is dumb by definition. Elitism doesn't want a cut-price car. In fact, elitism demands the opposite: a show of money. For the Superb to find warm acceptance in the prestige business section, there will probably need to be a revolution in attitudes to status at boardroom level. Skoda have seen some social upheavals in their time, but that may be a shift too far.
Nice try, though. And a very nice car. What next for the 21st-century Czechs? A hood ornament?
