The Guardian’s Saturday magazine has a column called “Things you only know if you’re not at work”. Being a home”worker” myself, so far one thing I haven’t seen mentioned in that column is the fact that during the daytime, Channel 5 turns into a kind of shopping channel. I turned on the TV to watch a video of last night’s ER while I ate my lunch but didn’t even get to put the video on because I was so fixated by a five-minute advert by TimeLife for a new series of dramatisations of Bible stories, collectively called – wait for it – The Bible. “These films are not available in the shops,” announced the gravelly-voiced narrator, which is always a bad sign. The first film available is called Jesus.  “Buy Jesus for £9.99 and get Joseph free!” went the offer. A lot of very good British character actors, including Gary Oldman (Pontius Pilate), Ben Kingsley (Moses), Dame Diana Rigg (Delilah) and Michael Gambon (er, Samson?) were shown looking serious in robes against dusty backgrounds while we were told over and over about how the offer of the films was exclusive, exclusive and exclusively exclusive. A phone number for emergency ordering of the films was given, but even more bizarrely an alternative phone number with an Italian flag next to it was also displayed in smaller print at the bottom of the screen…

Even worse, when the advert for The Bible was over, Starsky and Hutch came on. I used to love that when I was a kid – I had a toy car with the white flash down the side and everything – but, not having seen it for 20 years, I couldn’t believe the utter cheesiness of it. That’s the thing about Seventies retro – the revivalists retain the haircuts and the flares and the cool music, but they conveniently edit out the fact that about 75% of that era was given over to naff jokes about Starsky ripping his jacket or spilling his chilli dog on his trousers, while Hutch spent less time fighting crime than fighting off women. Give me The Professionals any day. Or check out They Fight Crime!, a brilliant site which generates random crime-fighting duos, such as: “He’s // a bookish gay // boxer // on his last day in the job. She’s // a transdimensional // nymphomaniac politician // looking for love in all the wrong places. They fight crime!”