Here I am, a successful television producer having made a fortune from selling my TV company and formats such as Survivor around the world, now getting stressed. And why? The crab apples fell off the branches a week ago and I have not yet found the time to turn them into jelly. Only last week, I got into a state because I had to pick the apricots before the squirrels got them, and I had to find time to make apricot jam.

Strangely the stress seems greater than when I ran a company with a turnover of £20m and 150 employees. I’m not sure whether it’s a reflection of me getting older or whether I’m trying to cram more things into my life as the days go by quicker. Alongside my country pursuits, I am producing a musical which is soon to play in the West End, running a company that invests in and nurtures media talent and doing property development. As well as that, I’ve become a patron of the London Film School and I’m working on a film script. Most importantly, I still set out every day to really enjoy my life.

I see it as a sadness that as people get older they lose their sense of fun and sense of proportion. The nutty witchhunt instigated by director general Mark Thompson at the BBC is a good example. I’m sure Mark Thompson must once have had a sense of humour (after all when he was chief executive at Channel 4 he did more than once tell his staff that he had no intention of going to the BBC) but he seems to have lost it now. Some of the absurder parts of this sorry affair should have been dealt with by laughter rather than po-faced cross-examination. I heard one of the many BBC senior executives-with-long-titles-but-no-clear-role at the BBC say that renaming of the Blue Peter cat was the most damaging thing any BBC producer had ever done. They obviously forgot about Petra (the Blue Peter puppy that died within weeks of starting and was replaced without telling the viewers); a deceit on the public that went on for years. Come on! It was a minor misdemeanour, nothing like the lucrative exploitative gambling on late night ITV or GMTV which conned millions by getting people to pay money for a competition they could never win. No one is in favour of deliberate lies but the BBC has gone a bit mad conducting McCarthy-style witchhunts and blaming all the wrong people for all the wrong things.

Indeed, all of television seems to have gone a bit crazy over this.  My favourite story is the Channel 4 lawyer who questioned whether Queen Victoria had really written a letter to a comedy show. There is also some irony in television dancing to a tune played by tabloid newspapers whose own standards occasionally require questioning. I remember once, as a trainee on a local newspaper, laying out the astrology pages. When the copy didn’t fit, a more senior colleague advised, “Just move this bit of Leo and put it in Sagittarius.”

I’m delighted that a judge has pointed out there are nine inconvenient untruths in Al Gore’s singular film. It’s particularly a shame because by knowingly including them the film’s makers weaken its argument. Even where it seems that something is objectively true such as it being impossible to create the world in seven days, there are outraged people saying it isn’t. For every filmed exposé of, for example, Scientologists, there’s a Scientologist exposing the activities of the filmmaker. Does anyone really believe those comedians on Have I Got News For You just came up those gags? The film The Queen was cleverly made up but I’m sure it left many people believing it was true. It was just a piece of entertainment and nothing to get worked up about. Don’t they realise that while no one should tamper with facts (where there are facts), no one these days believes much of what they see on TV or in any media anyway? We’re all so used to “spin” that we can only be certain of the things we see and witness ourselves.

Here in my house in Kent, these television rows seem so pointless and so far away. I’ve been thinking about why it should have been the case that in the small vineyard I planted three years ago after wondering what to do with some fields I’d bought the first grape harvest should have produced a couple of tonnes of pinot blanc and chardonnay grapes but hardly any pinot noir? Its an outrage. Maybe like ITV, I should get accountants DeLoitte & Touche to conduct an investigation. Then again, maybe not. Life is stressful enough as it is.

Charlie Parsons runs the small investment fund Charlie Parsons Creative