I recently came across a music channel on satellite TV, and being at something of a loose end settled down to watch. It was uniformly terrible.

I can only assume their target market was a male chav, judging by the number of permatanned plastic women in scanty outfits they seemed to feel the need to adorn it with. I realise that this is a common tactic for deflecting attention away from the lousy music, but it only works if the people you’re using are actually attractive. I’m reasonably certain "Bleurgh" was not the reaction they intended to get.

See, if you get it right you can do wonders with a music video. Treat it like a short film, make it funny, make it interesting. Bin the makeup, the hotpants, the gym bunnies, and follow the Stereophonics with their Italian Job-themed video for "Pick a Part That’s New" or the entertainingly lunatic Men at Work with "Land Down Under". I know there’s more money in appealing to chavs and cavemen but frankly, isn’t the challenge of making intelligent people laugh more fun? Posturing wannabe "gangstas" are comical, but we’re not exactly laughing with them…

On the plus side, we seem to have managed to get Men and Motors back along with large chunks of Channel 4, now this Freesat business has come on line. Whether we now get proper Channel 4 rather than S4C has yet to be investigated, but there was a great episode of The Saint on last night.