IUSUALLY escape to my bedroom to do my exercises when the early evening news is on the radio. That way I can get food for the body and nourishment for the mind all at once. But Sunday was a long day at church and I was late home. It was after seven when I picked up my weights and started to grunt and puff. So I'd missed the news and found myself listening instead to a children's programme called Go For It. Anyone talking to youngsters the way the presenter talked - a noxious mixture of phoney trendiness and condescension - should not be allowed within a three days' journey of a microphone.

I switched on in time to hear the story of the week, which was about a girl from a single parent family who was forever wetting herself. Slowly I twigged what Go For It is meant to be. Just as The Archers now exists to provide examples of all the latest social trends such as lesbian kisses and drug-pushing, so Go For It concentrates its output on children's problems. This is a foul and destructive thing to do. Children, no less than listeners to The Archers, do not want to hear the worst aspects of contemporary life fed back to them unexamined and uncriticised. What do listeners want then? When it comes to stories they want fantasy, epic and myth.

It's just the same with books and reading. I can still remember back in the 1950s when I was a boy in Leeds and walking most afternoons the mile and a half across waste ground and bomb sites to the children's library. What I read there - what all my friends read too - were the fairy tales of Hans Andersen and the far more gory and terrifying stories by the brothers Grimm. Witches, children boiled alive or eaten by giants; others bricked up forever behind castle walls: these were our staple diet.

It was the same when I grew up and became a schoolteacher. With the single exception of Kes, my pupils weren't interested in social realism. They craved CS Lewis' Narnia tales and The Lord of the Rings. They adored Treasure Island and the Greek myths. The older ones devoured such as Ivanhoe and stories of the crusader knights. Why don't the politically-motivated thickheads on Go For It notice that what children are turning to these days in huge numbers are Harry Potter and, once again, Lord of the Rings? Youngsters enduring a hard time at home - perhaps even wetting themselves and being in a one-parent family - do not want these cruel facts of their existence regurgitated all over them by an insensitive radio programme. They want adventure, fantasy and escapism.

But escapism is never merely escapism. The traditional myths, legends and fairy tales always have a profoundly moral centre. They are dramatic studies of good versus evil. The wet-yourself-urban-deprivation of Go For It does not present the eternal struggle between virtue and vice - only political propaganda and fashionable social nostrums dressed up as social realism. Only this morning I read about Clive Woodall, a man whose day job is on the fruit and veg counter in Sainsbury's, who has written in his spare time a children's story about the struggle between good and evil in the bird kingdom. I'm not in the least surprised to see that this story has been snapped up by the Disney Corporation and earned Mr Woodall $1m. Believe me, children know that there's nothing packs so much truth as fantasy.