I hope that you have not stuffed yourself too full of television this past week, whatever the temptations. Like food and alcohol and tobacco, it ruins the means by which it is ingested, eyes and brain, if taken in indiscriminate quantities. The tragedy of television, one for which the controllers (of the channels, but also of our time and our minds) are responsible, is that it is so often just “on”, and that so much of it is bad – brainless, cynical, thin, delusionary (is there a role for a TV Savonarola out there?)

Yet some of it is magnificent. The most magnificent, this past Christmas week, was tucked away on a minority channel, like one of Dickens’ waifs on a bitter London street. It was a small celebration, unheralded and unsung except by a nice public relations woman who told me about it, of the Shakespearean work of Sir Ian McKellen.