After no public demand whatsoever, the Mel Gibson Self-Sabotage and Masochism Spectacular has returned for another season. Stay tuned for all the Schadenfreude of a traditional celebrity downfall, mixed with vivid threats of the kind of violence rarely seen outside Jacobean drama, and a dusting of racism and misogyny to taste.

It's certainly good news for those among us who felt that the roadshow's last outing, in 2006, was all too brief. That one played out at a Malibu roadside, to an audience of just two: the police officers who apprehended Gibson for driving under the influence, and got a privileged insight into his views on the indispensable role of Jewish people in today's society.

Think of it as you would a DVD extra, a deleted scene, a peek behind the Wizard of Oz's curtain. Look, if Martin Amis can explain away his views as "thought experiments", maybe we should cut Gibson some slack. He'd already expressed homophobic and anti-feminist opinions, and clearly didn't want any group -- sexual, racial, religious -- to feel excluded, or unworthy of the hot glow of his ire. ("Mel Gibson better not say anything about white Englishmen," tweeted Peter Serafinowicz earlier today. "Am I right, my Briggas?")

The best thing about Gibson's return to the public stage is that admission is free; you need only halt your channel-surfing at the nearest entertainment channel or open a newspaper to sample Mel's latest despatches from the front line of life as a paranoid conservative with a martyrdom complex.

The skinny on him as we speak is that his ex-partner Oksana Grigorieva has made available two tape recordings of the actor unleashing a torrent of verbal abuse in her direction, deploying in the process a racist insult. You can almost hear Danny Glover, Gibson's African-American sidekick in the Lethal Weapon series, rolling out his old catchphrase -- "I'm getting too old for this shit."

But look beyond the racism, the allegations of domestic violence, the threat to kill Grigorieva and bury her remains in the rose garden -- heck, look beyond even Maverick and Braveheart and What Women Want if you're feeling particularly forgiving -- and you will see that the revelation of Gibson's tirade is only another part of the actor's oeuvre. I personally believe that we should encourage the extension of the auteur theory beyond the films themselves, and into the realms of the domestic.

In that context, it's easy to appreciate how Gibson's willing exposure of himself as a hateful human being must have a kind of grisly continuity for the man who gloried in the fetishistic power of his own suffering on screen, from enduring whuppings and dislocations and electric shocks in the first Lethal Weapon to the protracted torture scene at the end of Braveheart. The physical distress continued even in the projects where he stayed behind the camera; Apocalypto did at least have something of the John Huston-esque jungle-romp about it, but it was hard to shake the feeling that the Son of God was only a proxy for Gibson in The Passion of the Christ, His travails a mere stand-in for Mel's.

Whatever his alcohol dependency issues, Gibson would have known that he would attract for his abrasive behaviour the opprobrium of all but the most demented observers -- by which I obviously mean Whoopi Goldberg, who denied that her old chum Mel was racist, presumably to distract attention from her observation earlier this year that Roman Polanski had not committed "rape rape".

Gibson has several films lined up for release, including Jodie Foster's reportedly dark comedy The Beaver, but his agents WME announced this week that they had dropped him, claiming: "There's nothing to do for Mel Gibson at the moment. No one will touch him with a 10-foot pole."

I would venture that Gibson is exactly where he always meant to be, even if he didn't know it himself: spurned by the establishment, beaten and bloody, just like his character in Payback, only even less likeable.

Still, Gibson's career may not yet be over. What other middle-aged white male has been in the public eye recently on account of his violent tendencies, deeply ingrained misogyny and macho self-regard? Hollywood may be turning its back on Gibson right now, but I'm sure the British film industry would embrace the synthesis of actor and role, were he to sign on the dotted line for Raoul Moat: the Movie.

It's only a working title. But I spy a comeback.

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