To drive the point home, Mr Abhisit posed with an orange-clad motorbike driver at the launch of the programme, which he described as a "New Year's gift" to Thai people.

Many Thais are turned off by both the pro-Thaksin red shirts and their arch-rivals, the royalist "yellow shirts", who occupied Bangkok's international airports in December 2008.

The yellow shirts have been stoking nationalist feeling with heated rhetoric about border clashes with Cambodia, adding another unstable element to an already volatile mix.