Discreet charm

I’ve got this brilliant idea for a Sunday night TV series. It’s called Inspector Fluffy and His Agreeable Pipe. Every week, Inspector Fluffy (Stephen Fry) will travel to a picturesque corner of Britain in his battered Morris Traveller, giving tearaway gypsy children clips round the ear, discovering that it was a magpie that really took the silverware, judging marrow competitions in vicarage gardens. While cogitating on the latest mystery, he will suck on his agreeable pipe, with lots of stupendous Apprentice-style aerial shots showing the English countryside in all its gasp-inducing majesty.

It’s easy to take the mickey out of Sunday night TV but I think what we snooty critics sometimes forget is it’s not there for us. It’s not there to be clever or challenging or even good. Its sole purpose is to distract the millions of people out there who would otherwise be thinking, ‘Heavens, it’s Monday tomorrow. Work. Bills. Get up early. Horror. Better kill myself right now.’

Last Sunday’s perfect anti-suicide moment was Martin Clunes riding a big cart horse in the sea in Martin Clunes: Islands of Britain (ITV1). Up until that point, you might have been thinking, as I was, ‘Truly, this is the most staggeringly inane travel series ever.’ Clunes has been travelling from island to island around Britain, for no other reason than that he was once in a popular sitcom, islands look great shot from a helicopter and the ones nearest Britain are cheapest to film. One island — Sark, I think — he described as: ‘Very different.’ Then added guiltily, ‘I keep saying this about all the islands I’ve visited. But it is.’

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