Dear John

I spend a lot of time deriding the viewing habits of the general public, which is a polite way of saying a lot of my friends have poor taste. Television, I used to think, is an excellent guide to the decline of civilisation, but I consoled myself with the thought that no matter how bad it got we would never sink as low as our American cousins. Blind Date, which ran for an astonishing 18 years, disabused me of that notion; who commits the greater crime - the country that creates an appalling television format or the country that copies it?

Later I decided it had always been crap, rather like discovering how bad your favourite childhood cartoon was, though it hasn’t stopped me from mocking those who watch reality programmes or the various soaps; excepting Coronation Street because... er... that’s the one I watch. There is great television available, if you look hard enough, but what greater pleasure can there be than finding quality where it is least expected? None more so than in John Stape, Corrie’s increasingly hapless serial killer:

You buried my son under a knicker factory.

…complains his soon to be latest victim. To which he replies:

It sounds worse than it is.