Our George got it wrong

Now we have proof that he was wide of the mark: at the end of the 20th Century, it is Big Sister who runs the Thought Police and they have exploited the omnipresent television screen to control the minds of the Great British Public.

Our George (real name, Eric Blair) predicted that men would use the telly to dominate our political thinking.

Big Sister, on the other hand, has realised that this was daft. She and her gender have honed in on a much more lucrative market: not how we think but how we spend. And they are laughing all the way to the bank.

What provokes this thought is that fact that the TV chef Delia Smith, who spent last year teaching us how to boil eggs, has become the 932nd richest person in the UK with, if the Sunday Times is to believed, £24 million in the bank.

That's a whole lot of omelettes and when Ms Smith actually made a TV series about the humble chuckie, eggs sales tripled and some supermarkets even ran out.

Well Mrs C is a pretty dab hand in the omelette department. But the last time I stole a peep at her Post Office savings account, the only nought in sight came after the 5, as in 50p.

But Ms Smith is not the only one who seems to have reduced our national brain cells to the consistency of scrambled egg. A certain red-haired lady of shapely proportions and a man's name, one Charley Dimmock, has become the toast of every garden centre in the land.

For when the lovely Charley recommends some new plant on the TV gardening programme Ground Force, the punters descend like locusts and within minutes, the shelves (or rather, the cold frames) are stripped bare.

Now I am not averse to good cooking and my granny knew more about eggs than our Delia and would certainly not let anyone teach her how to suck them. And I am far from unfond of pretty ladies, although that is a remark which will undoubtedly enrage the feminists: men are no longer allowed to make judgments on the physical charms (or the lack of them) of the opposite sex.

But I do worry that a once-proud nation's brains can be turned to mush by 30 minutes of telly not much higher in intellectual content than the average quiz show. I love, for instance, Sophie Higson, who always seems to cook at her best when in the latter stages of pregnancy.

I adore the Two Fat Ladies, who are doubtless past that sort of thing, but are hilariously funny as well as self-deprecating: they know that good food is fun, not religion.

I also sorely miss the late Geoff Hamilton, who presenting gardening as it should be: a slow, steady battle against nature in such a way that you could almost smell the rich earth on his green fingers.

None of these people, however, caused me to leap into the car and break all the speed limits so as to be at the front of the crush at the supermarket or the garden centre.

So sorry, Big Sister, it's back to Gardener's Question Time for me. Steam radio, somehow, does not seem the microwave the brain!

l The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.