Do you remember when you couldn't throw a stone in a country road,without hitting Carol Smyllie? Where'd she go? One day all over the telly,next day,gone,gone and never called me Mother. And that buxum lassie who used to do Alan Titchmarsh's water features? One day, Venus arising from the foam on the cover of the Radio Times, the next, but a earthy watery memory... I suppose there's no chance of the same thing happening to Stephen Fry? Just imagine, nothing left but the ghost of a twitter...

That Carol was at her best when we were up to our oxters in "make-over" shows. Only Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen survived them to this day, if you can call "Popstar to Operastar" survival... More like slow death.. The slew of property makeover on TV was followed by a plague of gardening, which is where that big water-feature girl came and went, although we're still engulfed in slurry, loam and that little woman who looks like a bag-lady. Then it was "everybody move house" smartly followed by "everybody move to the sun". The main reason for watching these shows is to see if anybody is ever going to buy any of the properties over which they've been enthusing. So far it's "Jim and Julia are still thinking about it, but are still determined one day to make Majorca/Devon/Bulgaria their home..."

Bric a brac infests our mornings viewing, remakable only for David Dickinson's all -year tan and the wildly eccentric attention-seekers who present these "cheap as chips" programmes. We've had food and cookery coming out of our ears for years and now, even as Brucie comes to the twilight of his years, it's damned dancing. The tabloids shriek that the country's gone mad for it. Give over, it's the TV, stupid. Without an idea with which to bless themselves, programme-makers have called in the focus-groups, and Shazam! It's wall to wall terpsichore... We're all doomed...

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