Remote hopes

A good friend, namely the remote control, had been poorly for some time and, having been bounced off the floor once too often had limped along with the help of some garish insulation tape for some time. Finally, even the good, old-fashioned British male solution of a "hefty slap with the palm of the hand" failed to produce any life at all after a couple of weeks of whacks. Last week's BBC1 programme Innovation Nation, presented by Craig Doyle, showed a chap hailing his TV "zapper" as the greatest ever invention. He'd bought a super-duper, hand-held version to control all his viewing - we currently have four doing different tasks - plus a back-up job the size of a laptop, which could probably plan the rebuilding of Iraq in its spare time. So why didn't we simply buy a replacement for our dead friend? The age barrier was a problem for a start. Our remote was so ancient that it was named after Noel Edmunds' Telly Addicts' "hoofer-doofer" on which he used to operate TV clips to test two teams of couch potatoes. This week my wife strode confidently into Dixon's and asked for a new hoofer.

"I'm sorry, we don't do hoovers," came the confused reply from a young assistant.

"No, no, a hoofer," explained my exasperated wife, resorting to mime actions of operating the required item to no avail. We'd just got back to "we don't do hoovers" when I managed to change language channels to "remote control" before my wife switched her attention to cattle prods to deal with difficult shop assistants. First use of hoofer Mk11 brought us the return of camp cash-saver Alvin Hall in Your Money Or Your Life (BBC2, Tuesday). He arrived at an ex-council house, clinging to a hillside in Halifax, to tell youngish couple Vesna and Stuart that spending £2,000 a month when you earned £1,000 was a little unwise. As Stuart looked uncannily like my youngest brother, who enjoys fiscal control about as much as Danniella Westbrook took to I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, I assumed he was the family of four's spendthrift. So did wife Vesna until alarmingly honest Al pointed out she made 18 trips a month to the supermarket and was spending £1,000 on food and DIY goods. The couple duly cut eating and drinking costs to well under £200. "God knows how, we get through almost that in a week," commented my hoofer henchwoman. This charitable view did not extend to Cambridge Spies (BBC2, Friday). "These communists are a bloody gloomy lot and there are far too many people in bed together," she commented as the amazing lives of soviet spies Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt were told from 1934. Tom Hollander is having the acting time of his life as gay Guy Burgess, Blunt is a perfect description rather than a character for Samuel West while Toby Stephens is suitably rakish as Philby. Very little of all this is reckoned to be true, but it's beautiful bunkum all the same.