NO mobile signal? Rubbish broadband? Lucky you! At least your children might get a decent night’s sleep.

Many children don’t. In the last ten years there’s been a surge in children sleeping so badly that they’re having to resort to drugs to get them through the night.

Amazingly, this surge seems to coincide with the use of smartphones, tablets and TVs in bedrooms. Well, who’d have thought it?

Toddlers are given a tablets to entertain them at bed time. Many children not much older have their own smartphones which links them up to just about anyone and everything in the world.

And you thought Hansel and Gretel was scary…

Forget the bedtime story, chances are your child’s trying to sleep after a cocktail of Snapchat, Facebook, online bullying and possibly some porn thrown in. No wonder their brains are buzzing. It’s amazing they’re not fried.

But turn off a phone? You might as well ask a teen to chop off their hand.

Children who don’t sleep miss out on school work - difficult to absorb much when you’re snoozing – and are more likely to get fat. Just like a hangover, lack of sleep makes you crave fatty, sweet foods and anything remotely healthy fills you with revulsion.

Sleepless children are also often stroppy, sulky and a pain to live with, even before they’re teenagers. And turn their parents into zombies.

I had one child who never slept in the daytime and another who never slept at night. I still have the bags under my eyes to prove it.

But we persevered. Bathtime, story time, or read as long as they liked as long as they stayed in bed. It worked.

It usually does. When sleep clinics suggest that parents kept their children to a regular routine, ban any form of screen for at least an hour before bedtime and cut down on the fizzy drinks, 92% of families say the problem’s solved within weeks, if not days.

Obvious really. You might call it plain common sense. But then we didn’t grow up in houses brimming over with smartphones, tablets and televisions.

Good grief – until 1956 there was no television at all between 6pm and 7pm, just a blank screen - "the toddlers’ truce” - so parents could put their children to bed. How quaint is that? Even though I don’t suppose there was much chance of them getting hyper on a diet of Andy Pandy. I bet children slept better then.

And how many toddlers these days go to bed at six o’clock …?

JOAN COLLINS, 83, said in an interview this week that she’s not really rich because she has “only” about £24 million and that, she says, is not really “f*** you money.”

I’m not sure quite how much is considered enough to f*** you” but most of us would consider ourselves very rich with only a fraction of that dosh – and we’d be a lot politer about it too.

THE Nigerians are brilliant…

The man driving towards me had both eyes and both hands on his phone. He was texting away with the phone propped on the steering wheel. He didn’t have a clue that I or anyone else was there or that there was a junction coming up.

“Is he mad?” I thought, as I gave him a very wide berth and looked, amazed, in my mirror to see that he hadn’t actually hit anyone. Yet.

Next day, a middle-aged driver (the young have no monopoly on daftness) roared past me as I waited at a red light. Oncoming cars squealed out of his way and he raced off unheeding of the carnage he could have caused.

“Is he mad?” I thought again.

Now the government of Nigeria has had the same thought.

If drivers jump a red light in Nigeria, they’re presumed to be insane to do anything so stupid and so are carted off in an ambulance for immediate psychiatric evaluation. Before they can get their licence back they have to prove that they are sane.

Well, there’s a challenge for us all…

Offenders are charged for the test and have to do a three day course before getting their licences back.

As a result, there’s been a huge drop in the number of drivers jumping red lights. And that doesn’t seem mad at all.

A MOTHER in India who had her first baby, through IVF when she was 72 and her husband 80 says now that the baby is celebrating his first birthday that it has been much more tiring than she thought.

Well, I think we could have told her that, couldn’t we?

BEST news of the week – red wine can slow down the ageing process.

Eternal youth, here I come!