I have found television programes becoming more and more banal and formulaic and, to be truthful, sheer rubbish and insulting to the intelligence. BigBrothercelebritygetmeoutofhere at al, all the same, and I really don't understand what is entertaining about watching people sleep, perhaps I'm getting old!

I'm also tired of celebrity gossip being peddled as news and I'm also really fed up with news readers and reporters who cannot speak English properly, one glaring example is the constant use of the term "very unique", unique means that the thing being described is one of a kind, it therefore requires no qualifier, for it is either unique or it is not.

Even that August body, The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)(Television) is guilty of all these trends. When there were only two BBC television channels and one independant channel only the very best of programmes got to be shown, any that did get onto the television and were then unsuccessful were soon ended - remember the ill-fated soap opera "El Dorado".

There is however one part of the BBC that gives me hope that the flame of british broadcasting is still being kept alive. BBC radio 4 is alive and well and broadcasting varied, interesting, informed and educational programmes, from comedy, quizzes, politics, history, magazine programmes to farming and its famous soap opera "The Archers" and the ethics discussion programme, "The Moral Maze". If you too are tired of having your intelligence insulted I reccomend it most heartily. It will get your brain working again, you will learn all manner of things and you may, like me, find yourself screaming at the radio, or your computer (they have podcasts too, whatever they are) during "The Moral Maze", having been so stimulated by the discussion.