Take five

There is a word ‘deification’, but there ought to be a homophone, perhaps ‘dayification’, meaning the way daytime television spreads into the evenings.

There is a word ‘deification’, but there ought to be a homophone, perhaps ‘dayification’, meaning the way daytime television spreads into the evenings. There are now only five types of daytime programming apart from films and repeats: chat, quizzes and games, food, auctions and property. I plan to get rich by combining all of them into a daytime pentathlon show, in which contestants will have to confess to standing by their husbands even after they have had sex with goats, know in which Italian city you might find the Leaning Tower of Pisa, knock up saddle of rabbit in a blackcurrant jus with courgette flowers, sell a Victorian coal scuttle for 10 per cent above the reserve price, and finally examine a house on the Algarve, with 3 beds, 2 recep., wonderful views and a pool, at a very reasonable £240,000, then reject it on the grounds that there’s a cement factory next door.

Sometimes the process is a bounce-back. Antiques Roadshow was the grandad of all the ‘this is a beer mug my great-uncle brought back from China, do you think it might be T’ang dynasty?’ shows which fill the schedules after breakfast and before the 6 p.m. news. University Challenge started in 1962; Mastermind ten years later, and they always appeared in the evening. But others are essentially daytime shows, which are making their way into the evenings (Location, Location, Location; Come Dine With Me) not least because they are dirt-cheap. The presenters do all right, probably getting a four-figure sum per show, but the public appear for peanuts or nothing at all. Drama costs up to a million pounds per hour; Hunt That Slipper (actually Michael Frayn invented that; I think it would work rather well, with celebrities in a stately home) costs a small fraction.