You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.

Making a programme that appears to condone a positive stereotype actually enforces all the negative ones as well. It says that they all have a valid point. To assert that Americans are naive, Germans humourless and the French arrogant is one thing: they're big enough to take it. But to say that there's a conspiracy of Jewish bankers, that gypsies are thieves, Pakistanis are dirty and refugees are muggers is something quite else.

Television in the 1960s & 70s had just as much dross and the programmes were a lot more tediously patronising than they are now. Memory truncates occasional gems into a glittering skein of brilliance. More television, more channels means more good television and, of course, more bad. The same equation applies to publishing, film and, I expect, sumo wrestling.

I still secretly believe that afternoons are the time for the test card and you shouldn't watch television when the sun is out.

Is it a particularly British trait to so utterly adore truly appalling men, from Tony Hancock through to Steptoe and Alf Garnett, Captain Mainwaring, Rigsby, Del Boy, Victor Meldrew and on to David Brent from The Office. The most deeply adored characters are all simply vile.

Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.

Breakfast is everything. The beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day, a continuing life.