It doesn’t seem like a minute since I was complaining about gently pointing out the lack of anything except detective shows on TV. Now, quite frankly, I would bite the hand off any detective who showed him/herself on the screen, such is the dearth of any decent drama at all.

Assuming that commissioning editors have nothing better to do than read my blog – well, they obviously aren’t out there commissioning any good series, are they? – I have put together my list of demands. Just make these programmes and put them on telly as quickly as possible, ok? Or I might have to get cross or something. And you really wouldn’t want that.

1. The Killing. NOT the rubbish US remake, but the Danish original, with these small alterations: Sarah Lund will stop wearing that dire jumper and appear in an assortment of well-co-ordinated casuals, from Kew, Jigsaw or, if necessary, Boden. She will settle down with the long-suffering Bengt. She will pay attention to her son (who will lose the earring – yuck). She will change the bulbs in her house to at least 100 watts. She will do the housework and cook nourishing stews. All right, she might not have time to solve the murder, but so what? We can still have close-up shots of Pernille suffering so we know it’s all worth while.

2. Spiral. The red-headed corrupt lawyer will donate her entire wardrobe, beauty regime and gym membership to me. We will discuss the future of her colleague, the hot dark-haired lawyer, over drinks. Meanwhile, impossibly complicated French bits of plot will waft in and out of focus and the grey-haired prosecutor who looks a bit like Andy Warhol will scrunch up his face as though he’s just eaten too many Haribo Tangfastics.

3. Scott and Bailey. In the first episode of the next series (and make it soon, please), our dynamic duo will pounce on Rupert Graves and put him in the stocks. Then, at regular intervals during each episode, they will hurl rotten fruit and vegetables at him. His ex-wife and various ex-girlfriends can join in if they please. Meanwhile, the lady boss’s skirts will get tighter and tighter until eventually there’s a danger they may explode and kill everyone in the police station. Scott (or is it Bailey) manages to get her to the ER in time to have them surgically removed, thus proving once and for all that she is the responsible motherly one/the rookie who is finally growing out of her madcap ways.

4. Downton Abbey. This should be brought back immediately before I declare a state of emergency. I don’t care if they haven’t finished filming it, they can just make up the end as they go along. It’ll be all the interesting male members of the cast getting killed at Pascendale, anyway, so you hardly need a script, just a few shots of trenches with rats/abandoned helmets etc, cutting back to sobbing maid servants and Dame Maggie Smith showing the slightest possible degree of moisture in one eye as news filters back that her tea cannot be served as all the butlers have met their doom in Flanders fields.

5. Sugartown. The entire cast, apart from Sheila Johnson who is normally great, plus scriptwriters, director and producer, should be inserted into a cauldron of molten seaside rock and boiled for several weeks. The resultant batch of rock should be sold and should miraculously make enough to save the factory, which is then to be turned into a remedial school for drama script writers, called Abandon Cliches All Ye Who Enter Here.

Is that all clear? Off you go then.

I do try and limit our exposure to telly, though – hence the cupboard which I’ve made such a big fuss over and which I am, still, madly thrilled with. Somehow, stopping our sitting room from being dominated by that big, black, blank box has made it a room with thousands more possibilities. I’ve even – gasp – caught the girls reading there!

I remember when I first gave up work to look after Child One full time (initially I’d gone back to the newspaper I was working on for three days a week). I asked one of the mothers in the playground, in a semi-joking way, what on earth I could do to occupy my lovely little one, who was then rubbing mud into her hair with the ferocious concentration that only a fourteen-month-old has. She looked at me as though I was from Mars. ‘Television, of course,’ she said.

I was mildly surprised, but I did remember having read stuff about a new phenonmenon sweeping the nation’s cots at the time – Tellytubbies. I duly sat down with little Child One and we watched. She loved it. She loved it so, so much that, when the baby in the sun said goodbye at the end, and sank down beyond the horizon, she burst into tears.

It showed me how real television was to her and, consequently, how powerful it could be. Ever since then, I have rationed what they see, and still do, even though the cries of ‘oh Mummmmmmm’ still ring out. All their friends, they tell me, watch hours of telly, have TVs in their own rooms, and regularly watch 15 and even 18 certificate films.

Mine have now watched the occasional 15, like Love Actually, and I do adore taking them to mindless romcoms at the cinema, but I am glad I’ve never given in completely to wall-to-wall telly, or scary, violent stuff. I’m very conscious, now, of sounding smug, but I’m not – God knows I’ve made some crashing mistakes as a mother and as for my private life, I’ll just say arrrghhhhhh! But I do believe there’s enough rough stuff going on in the real world without watching it on telly at home.