JOHN BAIRD LOGIE

The people who are making the TV shows are not the same people as the people who are showing the TV shows.

The people who make the shows are trying hard to get the details right - little story facets, nods to character progression, a beginning, a middle, an end. They even have someone on set whose job title, according the closing credits, is "continuity".

The people responsible for showing television don't really understand continuity. In their eyes, we watch television in the same way that we eat crisps - we don't care which one we have so long as we get the sweet, sweet tastes of salt and vinegar. As long as they can get a twenty-five minute episode into that slot, they really don't care what's going on in it.

Children's TV gets it worse than anyone. Try watching a continuing story in an animated series - no matter how much you enjoyed the first part, part two could be shown at anytime, any place with little or no warning. Heck, it may even have already been on the week before. I mean, it's only a cartoon, right?

What are schedulers like when they get home? Do they blunder around the house breaking dishes, mirrors and limbs on the Monday only to find everything's back to normal on the Tuesday, and then, come Wednesday, they've lost three stone, have their arm in a cast and are bitter over a nasty divorce? When they read books do they start at whatever page it falls open at? Do these people even own television sets?

Maybe that could be the next reality television show. We could get all the schedulers together and make them watch stuff, y'know, in order.