Former Sex Pistol John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) wants to destroy everything you hold sacred.

While this isn't news for anybody who has followed the bile-filled career of the perpetually sneering punk icon, Lydon has found a new and genuinely novel method of wreaking his patented brand of mayhem.

The new medium is television, and the vehicle is a weekly, half-hour TV-magazine show on boomer video-channel VH1 -- pending the channel's approval of the yet-to-be-filmed pilot.

The show, tentatively titled "Rotten Television," will be "a broad-ranging, magazine-style show," said Eric Gardner, Lydon's manager. "But limiting it to the usual definition of magazine show is like calling 'Laugh-In' a sketch comedy show -- it just doesn't do it justice."

Gardner said the potential series will find Lydon, its sole host, offering editorial comments on "all aspects of modern culture," ranging from business, music, television, film and theater to fashion, sports, multimedia and computers. The pilot for the series, to be directed by famed video director Kevin Kerslake (Nirvana, Bush), will be filmed in July.

The concept for the program was launched when a former Lydon collaborator, George Gimarc, phoned up his friend Rob Barnett, VP of program planning at VH1, and pitched him the idea of a Lydon-hosted variety-style show, according to Barnett. "George, an old friend, who was the writer on [Lydon's syndicated radio program] 'Rotten Day,' is just this pop-culture maven, and he called me up a year ago with this idea of getting John on TV and asked me what I thought," Barnett said. "I told him to give me 24 hours. I stayed up all night writing a concept for Johnny and flew out to L.A. to meet with him."

Barnett said he and the former singer for the '70s pioneering punk outfit the Sex Pistols hit it off and have spent the past year developing ideas for what he called Lydon's "assault on the medium."

In mounting this offensive, Gardner said, the one prevailing theme of the show will be the impending end of the millennium, since the singer is said to feel strongly about starting off fresh in the year 2000.

"John intends to get that start by literally destroying as many of the icons of this millennium as he can," Gardner elaborated. "And when I say destroying, I mean physically, literally destroying." In a segment that Barnett has labeled "Cleanse the Century," the plan is to have Lydon display an artifact of the 20th century and find a novel way to annihilate it. "Whether it's hand-written Pistols lyrics, rare Beatles memorabilia or any other things mainstream people will consider iconic or irreplaceable, John will find a way to destroy it," Gardner said. "That might mean blowing it up, sending it over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or whatever."

Barnett expressed no reservations about the irony of the outspoken punk icon possibly finding a home at a channel that caters to a middle-of-the-road audience that has long since abandoned the kind of anti-establishment stance that the singer continues to espouse. "This is about John the man," Barnett said. "He's in a new stage of his career and with this and the film [an autobiographical movie based on Lydon's biography, "Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs"], I feel like the luckiest son of a bitch in the world to be the guy to do TV with him."

Gardner, predictably, had a more Lydonesque take on the channel selection. "MTV has never demonstrated any substantive interest in John," he said, "so he hasn't shown any substantive interest in them." Both VH1 and MTV are owned by the same company, Viacom.

The television pilot is just one of the high-profile projects outside music on which Lydon is working. In addition to the aforementioned autobiographical movie, for which Lydon will have script, director and casting approval, the singer just completed a cameo role as a film-festival party-planner in "The Independent," a feature starring Janeane Garofalo.

There are also plans to produce a full-length documentary about the Sex Pistols, as well as a Sex Pistols reunion-tour film, based on their 1996 concert blitz. Neither project has found a home yet, according to Gardner.